When did the arraignment of a former FBI director become the part of the evening you skip past to get to the entrée?
James Comey pleaded not guilty Wednesday in a federal courthouse in Alexandria, charged with lying to Congress, and at Eliza’s table that night in Georgetown the news arrived between the soup and the salad, by way of a phone glance, and was received the way you receive a weather alert for a county you don’t live in.
“Oh,” Eliza said. “Yes. That.”
The bipartisan lobbyist seated to my left — I will say only that he has lobbied for things and against them in roughly equal measure, sometimes in the same fiscal quarter — examined his cufflink and observed that “the institutional thing here is interesting,” which is what he says when he has not yet decided which side pays better.
I want to be clear about what was strange. It was not that no one at the table had an opinion. Everyone had an opinion. Each of us had arrived already holding the opinion we were going to leave with, fully assembled, like a casserole brought from home. What was strange was that no one was willing to set it down on the tablecloth where the rest of us could see it.
My sister-in-law Judy, who works at the National Archives and has watched four administrations file things, leaned over and said the part nobody else would: that we have now arraigned, indicted, investigated, or pardoned roughly every senior figure who used to be in charge of arraigning, indicting, and investigating, and that at some point the staffing chart begins to resemble a cast list.
Someone — I think it was the woman from the think tank whose name is two first names — said it was “a serious moment for the rule of law,” which is the phrase Washington reaches for when it would like to sound concerned without being specific. Then she asked if the lamb was from the place on Wisconsin.
The lamb was from the place on Wisconsin.
I tried to remember when an arraignment of this caliber would have stopped a dinner party. Not ended it — stopped it, the way a fire alarm stops one. I cannot remember. I think we have all gotten very good at the small adjustment that lets the meal continue: the polite reach for the salt, the pivot to the school district, the fond joke about the rosé. The adjustment used to be a quiet skill. It is now a credential.
By the cheese course the bipartisan lobbyist had decided that what he believed about James Comey was that the situation was “complicated,” and Eliza, who is fond of him, said “Margaret, please,” in the tone of voice that means we are not going to ruin this with a question we cannot answer before dessert.
Eliza brought out the lamb. It was, by unanimous consent, the only subject on which the table agreed. We called it the lamb course, and we asked for the recipe.