It was not, to say the least, a great start to their relationship. James B. Comey, then the F.B.I. director, arrived at Trump Tower two weeks before Donald J. Trump would be inaugurated in 2017. On the agenda was a briefing for the incoming president by Mr. Comey and the intelligence community chiefs on their finding that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to hurt Hillary Clinton.

But Mr. Comey also planned to give the president-elect some even more awkward news.

It was the first time they had met, and Mr. Comey’s message — that there was a document circulating in Washington full of salacious claims related to Mr. Trump and Russia — left Mr. Trump suspecting that the F.B.I. director was implicitly threatening him. Mr. Comey later said he believed he had no choice but to share the information, despite the possibility that Mr. Trump would take it as a demonstration of leverage over him.

Even before that first fraught encounter, their fates had been entangled by Mr. Comey’s decision in the campaign’s closing days to publicly reopen an inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server, a choice that Democrats assailed and blamed for her defeat. And after the Trump Tower meeting, the two men would be set on a path of escalating conflict and mutual loathing that led last week to a prosecutor handpicked for the task by Mr. Trump securing an indictment of Mr. Comey.

It is a well-documented clash of two supremely self-confident figures now tied together in American history: Mr. Trump, intent on retribution and willing to roll over democratic norms of justice to do so, and Mr. Comey, the professed straight shooter whose judgment on politically explosive cases gave ammunition to detractors on both sides of the aisle. Neither man ever sought an off-ramp.

Seen in light of Mr. Trump’s finally securing an indictment against someone he perceives as a political enemy — the first time he has done so — their well-documented, yearslong face-off amounts to a case study of how Mr. Trump, far from moving on as he won political and legal victories, grew ever more emboldened to direct the Justice Department to carry out his revenge agenda.

Asked to comment, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said, “The indictment against Comey speaks for itself, and the Trump administration looks forward to fair proceedings in the courts.”

Mr. Comey declined to comment.

Mr. Trump sought to see Mr. Comey investigated and prosecuted for the better part of a decade, relentlessly pressing reluctant aides across two administrations to take action against a figure he sees as pivotal to the Russia investigation, which he has always cast as a “witch hunt” intended to delegitimize his victory in 2016.

Mr. Comey, in turn, has for years been an outspoken critic of the president even as Trump and Clinton supporters alike have cast him as overzealous in how he used his power while leading the F.B.I. Two inspector general reports were sharply critical of how Mr. Comey handled the Clinton email investigation and the disclosure of memos he kept on his interactions with Mr. Trump.

But until last week, no prosecutor, including Mr. Trump’s second attorney general in his first term, believed that an indictment should be pursued, based on the existing evidence at the time. That happened only after Mr. Trump replaced a federal prosecutor who said a case was too weak to take to court with a personal loyalist, Lindsey Halligan, who was willing to override the judgment of career professionals in the U.S. attorney’s office in Northern Virginia.

She emerged from a grand jury on Thursday, five days before the statute of limitations ran out, with a two-count indictment accusing Mr. Comey of lying to Congress about whether he had authorized a media leak by someone else at the F.B.I. But the indictment left unclear precisely which leak is in question and did not set out the prosecution’s evidence.

Mr. Comey has denied the charges and said in a video statement that he welcomes a trial, saying, “I’m not afraid.”

A Question of Loyalty

Two days after being sworn in for his first term, Mr. Trump invited a group of officials to the White House, including Mr. Comey, who was a few years into a 10-year appointment as F.B.I. director.

Mr. Comey, who stands 6 feet 8 inches tall, appeared to be trying to be inconspicuous and blend in with the room’s blue curtains. But Mr. Trump, apparently putting aside his emotions over the Trump Tower meeting a few weeks earlier, called him over for a handshake and a pat on the back, turning to reporters to note their cordial moment and say that Mr. Comey was becoming “more famous than me.”

Days later, administration officials told reporters that Mr. Trump planned to keep Mr. Comey in his job. The president invited Mr. Comey for dinner.

There, according to an account provided by Mr. Comey in his 2018 book, Mr. Trump seemed to try to co-opt him, pressing him for “loyalty.” Mr. Comey resisted and wrote a contemporaneous memo about the discussion.

The following month, Mr. Comey said, Mr. Trump pressed the F.B.I. director to “let go” of the investigation into Michael T. Flynn, the retired general who had been pushed out as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser after he was accused of lying about his dealings with the Russian ambassador before Mr. Trump was sworn in. Again, Mr. Comey sidestepped Mr. Trump’s demand and wrote a memo about the interaction.

In March 2017, Mr. Comey disclosed in testimony before Congress that the F.B.I. was investigating possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russians. That public acknowledgment infuriated Mr. Trump. Two months later, the president fired Mr. Comey.

Mr. Comey later told Congress that a week after he was fired, he told a longtime confidant to disclose to a reporter for The New York Times the contents of a memo he wrote about Mr. Trump’s request to end the Flynn investigation.

The day after the contents of the memo were publicly disclosed, the deputy attorney general appointed a special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who took over the Russia investigation, as well as the question of whether Mr. Trump obstructed justice in dismissing Mr. Comey.

Mr. Trump soon made publicly attacking Mr. Comey a routine act. When Mr. Comey testified before Congress in June 2017 and said he had not leaked to the press, Mr. Trump almost immediately accused him of lying.

Blaming Comey for the Mueller Investigation

In April 2018, Mr. Comey, published a memoir that included detailed accounts of his discussions with Mr. Trump, and gave an interview to ABC News describing the president as “morally unfit” for office. Mr. Trump was enraged, and attacked him on social media, accusing Mr. Comey of sharing classified information.

That same month, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen had his home and office searched by the F.B.I., in an investigation that was an offshoot of the Mueller inquiry. By the end of the summer, Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to several charges, including a campaign finance violation in connection with a hush-money payment made in 2016 to Stormy Daniels, a porn star who claimed to have had an affair with Mr. Trump.

To Mr. Trump, everything stemming from the Mueller investigation began with Mr. Comey, even though Mr. Comey had been fired by the time Mr. Mueller’s investigation began.

In Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Comey was criminally investigated over whether there was classified information in the memo that he wrote about his interactions with Mr. Trump. An inspector general found that Mr. Comey had played a role in the memo getting to a journalist, but did not find sufficient evidence to support a prosecution. The attorney general at the time, William P. Barr, no fan of the Mueller investigation or of Mr. Comey, declined to charge Mr. Comey in connection with the memos.

Mr. Trump was furious. He spoke on the phone to one person after another, asking whether they agreed that Mr. Comey should have been charged, then took a remote control to the television in his private dining room and threw it at a credenza along the wall.

Mr. Trump posted that Mr. Comey should be “ashamed.” Mr. Comey quoted from the report showing that the inspector general had found no evidence that Mr. Comey or his lawyers released to the media any of the classified information in the memos.

“I don’t need a public apology from those who defamed me, but a quick message with a ‘sorry we lied about you’ would be nice,” Mr. Comey said at the time.

Under Scrutiny

Throughout Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Comey found himself under government scrutiny.

In 2019, Mr. Comey found himself the subject of a highly invasive and unusual I.R.S. audit, one that consumed time and money. (It ultimately led to his being given a refund.)

Mr. Barr appointed a special counsel to look into the origins of Crossfire Hurricane, the investigation into possible conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians. Mr. Comey was never charged.

In addition to the criminal investigation into his Trump memo, he had also been criminally investigated for whether he leaked classified information in connection with his handling of the Clinton email investigation. There were the two Justice Department inspector general investigations into his handling of those matters, as well as a third on a different topic: his handling of a warrant application under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor a Trump campaign adviser named Carter Page.

That investigation resulted in a report, released in 2020, detailing multiple irregularities with the handling of FISA warrants.

That same year, Mr. Comey endorsed Joseph R. Biden Jr., Mr. Trump’s rival in the 2020 campaign, saying on social media, “We need candidate who cares about all Americans and will restore decency, dignity to the office.”

Mr. Comey also testified before Congress again in 2020, this time by video from his home in Virginia during the pandemic. During an exchange with Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, he said that he stood by his 2017 testimony that he had not authorized a media leak while at the F.B.I.

There is still an ongoing investigation into whether the F.B.I. tried to destroy or conceal documents from the Russia investigation to protect Mr. Comey and others.

After Mr. Trump returned to office earlier this year, Mr. Comey posted an image of seashells on a beach reading “86 47,” a term of opposition to the president that could be read to mean getting rid of him.

The Secret Service investigated whether it amounted to a threat on Mr. Trump’s life. Amid a huge backlash from Mr. Trump’s administration and his followers, Mr. Comey posted another statement on social media saying he deplored violence and did not intend to endorse it. Still, federal authorities tracked Mr. Comey’s phone and followed him the day after the post, and then interviewed him.

In July, as Mr. Trump’s efforts at payback against his perceived enemies intensified, Mr. Comey’s daughter, one of the top prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, was fired. A son-in-law, a federal prosecutor, resigned from the office that brought the charges against Mr. Comey after the indictment was returned on Thursday.