Sen. Eric Schmitt leaned on his experience as a former Missouri attorney general as he laid out questions for Jack Smith at a Senate hearing Tuesday, displaying a poster of text messages and at one point telling the former special counsel to be careful of committing perjury.
Schmitt had no idea he was about to flub his gotcha moment.
The Missouri Republican mistook the names of two sports teams: the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks with the University of Iowa’s Hawkeyes. It was a slipup that fueled false accusations, an empty threat against the former special counsel and calls from another senator for Schmitt to apologize for getting it wrong.
And it overshadowed Republicans’ attempts at the Senate Judiciary Committee to grill Smith over the probe that led to criminal charges against Donald Trump, which were dropped when Trump returned to the White House.
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Schmitt touted that he had obtained the Trump special counsel investigation’s internal communications and asked Smith if he attended a Hawks game in Atlanta on Feb. 3, 2024. That date lines up with a time when Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was struggling with her own Trump case because the public had discovered her sexual affair with a subordinate prosecutor, Nathan Wade.
The senator would later accuse the prosecutors in these parallel cases of meeting secretly to coordinate. Schmitt asked if Smith went to that Hawks game, was in Atlanta that day, or met with Willis or Wade during his time as special counsel. Smith answered no to all of those.
When Smith appeared utterly bewildered at the accusation, Schmitt doubled down.
“What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior-Hawks game on Feb. 3, 2024 — the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?” Schmitt asked.
His staff raised a poster featuring text messages and quickly pulled it down. Smith looked confused.
“I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t perjure yourself,” Schmitt said. “I think you’ve already perjured yourself.”
The poster prominently featured images of Willis and Wade, the State Farm Arena in downtown Atlanta, and text messages between members of Smith’s special counsel team indicating that “109 Row 1” was “reserved for Jack.”
After more questions on other topics, Schmitt concluded.
“You may think you’re a hero in this story, but let me tell you something. You’re the villain. You’ve done so much damage — as a former prosecutor, I can say this — so much damage to the faith people have in our system,” Schmitt said. “You will go down as a total dirtbag.”
It was the wrong game.
In actuality, Smith had tickets to see Caitlin Clark play during her record-breaking senior year in college before she became one of the WNBA’s most elite scorers.
And the facts lined up more neatly with reality: Smith, who resided in Maryland, had decided to attend a game between the Iowa Hawkeyes and the University of Maryland women’s college basketball teams.
When Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) realized what was going on, she was incensed.
“Perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully,” Klobuchar said to her panel colleague.
Schmitt began to complain that he was being called out over his mistake. “Are we just having, like, an open session here? I’m glad you’re trying to rehabilitate the witness but it’s not your time,” Schmitt said, insisting that he had simply presented text messages “that could have obviously been related.”
“I think that people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag — and not get the teams wrong,” Klobuchar shot back.
At the end of her questioning, Klobuchar noted that Senate staff had confirmed the Iowa-Maryland game had occurred on Feb. 3, 2024 — and it was a game to remember. Clark scored 38 points and pulled off 12 assists, leading her team to a 93-85 win over Maryland and securing the first Hawkeyes victory in College Park in 32 years.
“It must have been a pretty good game,” Klobuchar said, adding that Schmitt should have apologized for calling Smith a “dirtbag.”
After the hearing, when asked about the questioning, Schmitt told reporters: “I asked him if he was in Atlanta. He said he’s in Maryland. Maybe he’s telling the truth. Maybe he’s not. He’s lied before.”
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