Without having to pour a single free drink, the Capitol Hill bar that promised to buy a round every time President Trump tweeted Thursday morning during James Comey’s must-watch congressional testimony drew at least 500 customers. That was Union Pub general manager Ashley Saunders’s best guess anyway: “It was perfect!” she told me. If her tally excluded reporters, she was a little short. There were at least a dozen reporters at that one pub. It was a can’t-miss story, the spectacle of the spectators, watching the watchers.
Shaw’s Tavern, site of the well-documented Covfefe party and the $5 Stoli shot, had a line of wannabe Comey watchers trailing around the block by 9:45, 15 minutes before the hearing began. They had to turn away the hordes who would have pushed them past capacity. Christina Huynh, a 25-year-old who runs social media for an environmental NGO, ended up at the more spacious Union Pub with her college friend Lindsey, visiting from Little Rock, Arkansas. All so the out-of-towner could get a taste of what D.C.’s really like. “It’s peak D.C.: We’re in a sports bar essentially, but what’s on TV is the Comey hearing.” Political theater is just the half of it, Huynh added. “Of course, it’s only in D.C. that you would go to a bar and drink before noon.”
Millennials, the stereotypical day drinking demographic, didn’t entirely dominate. Dan Leathers, who recently retired from the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, came to Union Pub just hoping the president would tweet. (“I know more than I want to about tweeting, and I think it’s a stupid thing myself,” Leathers said, speaking for all good people.) “We’re all here because of the Twitter idiocy,” that is to say, not so much for the hearing—but the pub’s publicity ploy tickled him, so he and his friend and fellow retiree Jeff made a day of it.
Rayford Larkin, a Metropolitan Police officer for more than 20 years, was disappointed by the standing-room-only claustrophobic crowds at Union. If not for Comey-palooza and the possibility of free drinks? “I’d be at work,” he said, but the force can do without him for the day—”They’ve got other people out there. I took off work early.” He was just a kid during the final days of the Nixon administration, he said, so “This is definitely the weirdest” unraveling of a political scandal he’s witnessed. “Everything is weird these days,” the When I told him my age, he made me a somber promise: “You’re going to see a lot of weirder things than this.”
Officer Larkin found a seat on the patio near Lennart Luhtaru, a professional translator and Estonian immigrant with a wire-haired terrier pup snoozing in his lap. He’d moved to the U.S. seven years ago, following the American woman who became his wife, a Justice Department employee now privately pining for former President Obama. (Under the Trump administration, “She cannot have feelings anymore,” he said.) “I’m hoping this stupid thing will be over soon with impeachment,” Luhtaru told me, just as the CNN chyron informed us Comey wouldn’t say whether Trump had obstructed justice. “Well, we have some time.”
Two Midwestern lawyers in their 20s with clashing reads on the Trump coalition sat together at a corner table: Nate Dreyfuss, a finance attorney at D.C. law firm, and his college buddy James Lesinski, a recent law school grad. James is a Kasich Republican from Toledo and Nate a Clinton supporter from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Do folks back home who voted for Trump care about Comey? No way, the old friends said, practically in unison. But they did: James skipped a morning’s studying for the Virginia State Bar exam, and Nate ditched his firm for half a day. “I should be at work,” Nate confessed. But even if he had been, he wouldn’t have been productive:, “I’m texting my colleagues who are sitting in their offices watching it together.” He’s been watching in disbelief since Michigan’s Trumpward swing “came out of nowhere.” James was less surprised by the heartland’s voting pattern last fall: He worked one summer during law school for the municipal government of Parma, an old steel town outside Cleveland. “They’ve been loyal democratic voters since FDR, or at least since Kennedy, and I haven’t looked at the precinct data, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they went to Trump.” (He was right: Parma, Ohio went to Trump by nearly 2,000 votes, or 4 percent.) Nate countered that Trump merely lied to the working class stuffs; James replied that Nate was missing the point.
I glanced back at the two of them a few minutes later, while I hailed a cab to the next stop on the Comey bar crawl, and they looked less cheerful than when we met. Did drawing out their political differences ruin a once-in-a-lifetime Comeypalooza? The residual guilt pangs mostly dissolved by the time I’d pulled up to Duffy’s Irish Pub, though—a sports bar that opened early to play Comey on its 15 indoor screens and mix orange-creamsicle “Covfefe” cocktails. About 300 people came to watch, according to a waiter who’d been there all morning.
Neighborhood regulars turned out with their dogs and babies. Boisterous grad students yelled at the screen—and only one guy was wearing a suit: Vincent Brown, 26. He should have been tending to the government affairs of a massive multinational corporation with a vested interest in infrastructure spending and regulatory and tax reform that he was cagey about naming. (It rhymes with squeegee, but backward.) “I’d probably be at the office honestly having one screen on the hearing and then the other screen work,” he laughed. “The investigation picking up is really derailing any prospect or possibility of any major legislation.”
Duffy’s cross-talking crowd surpassed the gasps of oh no, he didn’t, nervous laughter, and scattered applause of the Union Pub. The whole reason stay-at-home mom Elizabeth Lyttleton came out, she said, was to find like-minded company: “Being around people who also look at it and go GAH! is important to me.” Plus, she made a new friend: Alison DeCamp from Takoma Park. They bonded over both having worn their blue “Nasty Woman” T-shirts, relics from the Clinton campaign. (It’s perhaps also a solemn remembrance of the fact that, though both are now folk heroes in repose, Comey hurt Hillary once.) “It’s nice to have that affirmation that you’re not alone,” Lyttleton said. Alison added that it was not a day for watching alone and “screaming in the dark.”
Senator Kamala Harris’s questioning got Duffy’s rowdiest cheers. But the liveliest commentary came from a group of recent Kennedy School graduates, public policy fellows in Cambridge until two weeks ago. When Oklahoma senator James Lankford asked, “How would the president make an ongoing investigation stop?” one sunburned degree-holder, who later told me he aspires to work for Senator Ron Wyden, shouted, “He’d fire me!” That was Brandon, speaking for Comey’s inner Bulworth. He withheld his surname lest future employers catch him portrayed ungenerously in print. Mike, 29, had the same thought. He and a his unnamed roommate just finished their MBAs at George Washington; now they’re looking for work. “We’ve been drinking our feelings,” they told me. But on the bright side, it should be “the first of many day drinking hearings” pertaining to the Trump administration’s Russian entanglements—future excuses to fritter a workday morning away.
