JOHN HINDERAKER: Proof That James Comey Misled the Senate Intelligence Committee.

James Comey says there is a pattern to his dealings with presidents: he is an honest man who only needed to create memos to document his conversations with Donald Trump, because Trump is untruthful. But that isn’t the real pattern. The real pattern is that Comey is a snake in the grass who creates tendentious, self-serving memos that can later be used to cover his own rear end or to discredit presidents, but only if they are Republicans.

He’s a political manipulator, but not an especially bright one.

Related: Comey’s testimony proves he’s the biggest loser.

If you want a visible symbol of all that’s wrong with Washington these days, look no further than the 6-foot-8-inch frame of James B. Comey Jr., whose DC circus act finally closed on Thursday with an unctuous performance before the Senate intelligence committee. Seeking to take down the president of the United States for unceremoniously firing him, the former FBI director succeeded primarily in embarrassing himself and the bureau.

Call him the Biggest Loser.

But Comey’s not alone. During his much-hyped testimony — treated by the media as the second coming of Joe Valachi ratting out the Mafia — Comey did manage to smear president Trump’s character (a “liar”). He also succeeded in wounding his former boss, Loretta Lynch, embarrassing The New York Times and hurting the feelings of the anonymous-quoting media by likening them to “feeding seagulls at the beach.”

For a White House press corps praying for Watergate Redux, Comey even outed himself as this year’s model of Deep Throat, freely admitting he leaked his own memo regarding his unease with Trump via a buddy at Columbia Law School. He admitted he did it to provoke the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the alleged Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election.

Comey’s self-detonation took down others as well. He described in detail how former Attorney General Lynch insisted that he characterize his probe into Hillary Clinton’s egregious mishandling of classified materials as simply a “matter” rather than an “investigation.”

Troubled by Lynch’s prejudicial meeting with Bill Clinton on the tarmac in Phoenix while his wife was under Justice Department scrutiny, he therefore took the matter into his own hands by injecting the FBI directly into the campaign, not once but twice — something he had no right to do.

Another casualty of his testimony was his description of a “blockbuster” Times story in February that alleged “repeated contacts” between Team Trump and Russian intelligence officials as “almost completely wrong.” That story, like most of the anti-Trump reporting lately in the Times and The Washington Post, was based on anonymous “current and former American officials.” The president has been madly tweeting about “fake news” for months, and here was a classic example of it.

Even Comey’s friends haven’t escaped unscathed. The man who supposedly read Comey’s still-unseen private memo to a reporter, identified as professor Dan Richman, has gone to ground after Trump’s personal attorney, Marc Kasowitz, issued a statement suggesting legal action for “unauthorized disclosure of privileged information.”

Like I said.