“What a long, strange trip it’s been” (Grateful Dead, 1970).

The recent five-day period, bookended by the testimony of former FBI Director James Comey before a congressional investigatory committee and the later testimony of current U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions before the same committee, fits the 47-year-old lyric like a glove.

Of course, the main events were the testimony of Comey; Indiana’s own Dan Coats, director of National Intelligence; Admiral James Rogers, director of the National Security Agency, the secretive NSA; and Sessions.

Prior to Comey’s testimony, our president was reported in a New York Times story as having told Russian diplomats during a meeting in the Oval Office that he had “just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real ‘nut job,” and firing him “relieved great pressure,” alluding to the multiple investigations into Russian tampering in our last presidential election.

Comey really didn’t come across that way.

Did he put himself in the best light possible? Wouldn’t anyone sitting in that witness chair? But was he credible? Most assuredly. A “nut job?” Don’t think so.

The veracity of the two incidents that might amount to obstruction of justice – the one-on-one meeting with the president after the president shoos everyone else out of the room and then expresses the “hope” that Comey would go easy on Mike Flynn, and then, the demand for a “loyalty oath” – remain unchallenged.

The president, in the process of justifying his actions on his Twitter account, essentially admitted that both incidents occurred pretty much as claimed, although in his opinion, he believed he was acting within his powers as president.

In the course of his testimony, Comey dropped some other names into the hopper, which is where the fun really begins.

Coats, Rogers, and eventually Sessions quickly “volunteered” to testify before the congressional committee to “set the record straight” and defend themselves against any impugning of their characters.

The fact testimony is “voluntary” places the volunteers among the angels. They got to sit and receive the plaudits of committee members from both sides of the aisle thanking them for appearing voluntarily, and then got further thanked profusely for their past services.

Without interruption, they gave their version of events which, like Comey’s, qualified them for wings and a halo.

Then came the questions, the answering of which was the reason why they were there in the first place.

But whenever the questions involved their interactions with the president, they suddenly become as reticent as maidens on a tour bus full of reprobates.

Not a bad gig. Testify to whatever you want, and don’t testify to whatever you don’t.

Let’s particularly consider Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the quintessential Southern cavalier.

To paraphrase his opening statement (and exercising a whole lot of poetic license): “My goodness, I just can’t believe all these scurrilous things people are saying about me. Why, I do believe it’s giving me the vapors. Mercy, mercy. Bless their little hearts, they know not of which they speak.”

To his credit, Sessions actually made a plausible argument why Comey could have been fired over his handling of the Hillary Clinton affair.

It would have helped if he had championed those reasons in 2016, but back then Sessions was most likely applauding Comey’s actions. It would have helped further if he had not been hung out to dry by a president who said on national TV that his real motivation for firing Comey was his handling of the Russia investigation.

Sessions launched into a convoluted and incomprehensible discussion of the operation of the concept of executive privilege, and unspecified departmental policies, Apparently, according to Sessions, if the executive (i.e., the president) has not invoked executive privilege, government officials, standing in for the executive, have the right to refuse to answer questions from a congressional committee until the executive, after the fact, decides whether he wants to invoke executive privilege retroactively.

Really?

The ball is in the committee’s hands, or in those of the special counsel, if they have the stomach for it. If subpoenas are issued in a criminal investigation, the main holding in U.S. vs. Nixon, 418 US 683 (1974) appears to be on point as to claims of executive privilege. In its unanimous decision, the Supreme Court said, “We conclude that when the ground for asserting privilege as to subpoenaed materials sought for use in a criminal trial is based only on generalized interest in confidentiality, it cannot prevail over the fundamental demands of due process of law in the fair administration of criminal justice. The generalized assertion of privilege must yield to the demonstrated specific need for evidence in a pending criminal trial.”

In other words, if the issue is pushed, odds are the content of those conversations of Coats, Rogers, Sessions, or anyone else, with the president, and relevant to the Russia investigation, are going to be subject to discovery down the road.

In one final, sad, footnote to Sessions testimony, in an exchange with Senator Angus King (I-Maine), the attorney general agreed that the tampering of the U.S. election by a foreign power was a serious matter.

King asked: “You received no briefing on the Russian active measures in connection with the 2016 election?”

To which Sessions responded, “No, I don’t believe I ever did.”

Given the national security reports that came out as far back as last October, so much for intellectual curiosity, and aggressively protecting the sanctity of our election process.

As noted in the beginning, “what a long strange trip it’s been.”

And how much stranger will it become?