1. He considers Trump a liar and his assessment of the President's character — even before he took office — caused him to act differently in order to protect himself and the FBI. "The administration...chose to defame me and more important the FBI," Comey said. "Those were lies, plain and simple." He said his concern that Trump would lie about their one-on-one encounters was part of the reason why he took such detailed contemporaneous notes. Comey said he never had that concern about the two previous Presidents he'd served in different capacities.
2. How deeply wounded he was by the way he was fired. We knew that Comey found out about his firing by looking up at a TV screen, but it was only after seeing him talk to his former colleagues at the hearing today that we got insight into how hurt he felt. "I am so sorry I didn't get to say goodbye to you publicly," Mr. Comey said to his former FBI colleagues, whom he knew would be watching on TV.
3. Comey revealed how he leaked out his memo about the Trump dinner. He said he asked a good friend of his, a professor at Columbia Law School who he didn't name, to give it to the reporter (Michael Schmidt at the New York Times.) Comey said he leaked this out because he read about Trump's tweeting about the "tapes" of his conversation, and he hoped that it might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. As reporter Peter Baker noted on Twitter: "Can't remember the last time someone in DC openly acknowledged orchestrating a leak — and without any senator having even asked."
4. Comey's senior FBI colleagues were as troubled as he was by the President's private comments. "I think they were as shocked and troubled by it as I was," Comey said. "They're all experienced people. They've never experienced such a thing."
5. The former FBI director admits he was less than brave in the moment when he alleges the President made his request about easing off the Flynn probe. He says he didn't have the "presence of mind" or the courage to tell the President his request was inappropriate.
6. Republicans and Democrats on the Intelligence committee appear to find Comey's testimony credible, despite the President denying he made the private comments about Flynn. James Risch, Republican Senator from Idaho, went so far as to praise Comey for the clarity and detail of his prose in his opening statement.
7. Comey revealed that Trump wasn't the only top official he's found "concerning" over the past year. He said the former Attorney General Loretta Lynch told him to call the Hillary Clinton email investigation a "matter" instead of "an investigation." That "confused me and concerned me."

MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell pointed out that any actor would want to act it, and any director would want to direct it.

Comey's pre-released testimony, about a Jan 27 dinner in the White House Green Room: "[T]he President said, 'I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.' I didn't move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed. We simply looked at each other in silence."

For all the cable-news talk of smoking guns, top Republicans were authentically relieved by what they read in the afternoon bombshell.

Their reaction puzzled me at first, but here's a truth bomb: Comey's seven-page, 3,100-word statement describes unusual, unprecedented and, to most, disturbing behavior by the president. But it presents no new information that proves a crime:

• Read between the lines, and you see Trump's transactional side — trying to make a distraction go away, like you would in business. The problem of course, is that he's no longer just running a family business: Corner-cutting and interference doesn't work in the Oval.
• The rapier reporting by The New York Times' Michael Schmidt was perfectly borne out. Putting aside the astonishing atmospherics, the facts of Comey's account are what we expected, but not much more.
• The key passage, when Comey says Trump "called me at the FBI" on March 30: "He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia. He asked what we could do to 'lift the cloud.'"
• Brookings senior fellow Benjamin Wittes, a friend of Comey's and editor-in-chief of the Lawfare blog, posted one of the best deconstructions of the statement, calling the Trump scenes "poisonous stuff ... conduct that a society committed to the rule of law simply cannot accept in a president."
• But Wittes also writes: "Let's leave to another day whether anything the President did here amounts to any kind of obstruction of justice."
• A top Republican close to the White House said the statement "shows Trump is relentless and unconcerned with Presidential behavioral conventions, which are two of the characteristics that won him votes."
• Republicans, though, need to recognize what they're defending: actions that show little respect or understanding for the lines and limits that safeguard rule of law. This isn't normal.

Be smart: The road ahead is long. Comey's statement is captivating, but not grounds for impeachment. The threshold for any action is much higher than many think, because Republicans alone will set it.

The issue: Private equity's employment record is difficult to discern, since private companies rarely disclose payroll information to anyone other than tax authorities. But a group of business school professors ― including Harvard's Lerner and the University of Chicago's Steve Davis ― secured access to the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database, which is derived from IRS records, and then matched those employment records with thousands of private equity transactions that occurred between 1985 and 2005.

They were required to only use the data in the aggregate (i.e., not identify specific transactions), and in 2011 released a working paper that used a control sample of companies not owned by private equity. It found:

• Private equity has just "a modest net impact on employment ... employment shrinks by less than 1% at target firms relative to controls in the first two years after private equity buyouts."
• Company demographics have a large impact. Net job losses were higher for retail companies and public companies taken private, while job gains were found for independently-owned companies.
• Despite the "modest" net results, private equity does create quite a bit of labor turmoil ― firing an above-market number of people in the early days after buying a company, but then also hiring more people in the investment's latter years.

What comes next: Both private equity and the broader labor market have changed a lot since 2005, so the researchers last year decided to update their paper with an extra decade worth of data. It's expected to be released within the next few months.

The fallout: Because private equity executives have regularly used the 2011 paper to push back against "job destroyer" claims, they are inextricably linked to the revision. For better or for worse.

• For better: Buyout executives will have a giant arrow in their quiver when fighting everything from tax increases to SEC registration requirements to media attacks on their alumni who are running for political office (i.e., the next Romneys).
• For worse: They'll need to do more than stop complaining about bad PR. They'll have to justify their own existence without looking like hypocrites ― something that could be a tougher trick than turning around a troubled company.