Jack Smith, the former special prosecutor who investigated numerous instances of alleged wrongdoing by President Trump, appeared before a Senate committee Tuesday. One GOP senator appeared to catch Smith committing perjury over an alleged conspiracy between the special prosecutor and the District Attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, but the elaborate and bizarre allegation quickly fell apart when it became clear that the accusation was based on a confusion of two basketball teams.
GOP senator pushes conspiracy theory against Smith, is immediately proven wrong
As Jack Smith testified before Congress on Tuesday, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Missouri) launched into a strange line of questioning, asking Smith if he had been in Atlanta and attended a Hawks basketball game on Feb. 3, 2024. As a confused Smith denied being in the city or attending the NBA game in question, Schmitt explained that the “context” of his question was that the game that Smith allegedly attended occurred the day after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis had “come clean” about her romantic relationship with Nathan Wade, a prosecutor who was working for her in her office’s investigation of Trump for election interference in Georgia in 2020. The implication Sen. Schmitt was attempting to draw appeared to be that Smith was somehow involved or aware of Willis’ improprieties and that he had traveled to Atlanta to meet with her and used the basketball game as a cover for being in the city. “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta, at a Warriors-Hawks game, on Feb. 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?” Schmitt asked, as his aides erected and then quickly took down a poster board with information printed that presumably related to this alleged communication. As Smith continued to deny being in Atlanta and asked for clarification, Schmitt accused him of lying. “I think you’ve already perjured yourself,” Sen. Schmitt declared, also calling Smith “a total dirtbag.”
The bizarre attempt by the GOP senator to either implicate Smith in some kind of conspiracy or to catch him lying before Congress fell apart as quickly as it developed. Smith soon clarified that he had gone to a completely different basketball game on the date in question, watching the University of Maryland women’s basketball team host the University of Iowa’s team. “Caitlin Clark was playing,” Smith recalled. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) jumped into the conversation as she and her staff confirmed that Smith had attended the game in Maryland that day — not the NBA game in Atlanta — and noted that Schmitt likely confused the Atlanta Hawks and the Iowa Hawkeyes. As Schmitt attempted to defend his questioning and attack the Democratic senator for speaking out of turn, Klobuchar called him out for pushing false information about Smith in order to attack his character and accuse him of wrongdoing. “I think people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a ‘dirtbag’ and not get the teams wrong,” Klobuchar clapped back at Schmitt as they spoke over one another.
Republicans double down on embarrassing attacks against Trump opponents
The strange incident surrounding Schmitt’s immediately debunked accusation has proven to be an embarrassment for the Republican senator and his GOP colleagues who have sought to attack Smith. “Eric Schmitt beclowns himself during Jack Smith hearing,” wrote journalist Aaron Rupar on X as he reposted video of the exchange.
Pondering Politics host Jessiah Eberlin focused on the reaction of Schmitt’s Republican colleague, Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, “and her look of UTTER HORROR as she watches MAGA Senator Eric Schmittstain Schmitt end his career in a most humiliating fashion.”
Mike Nelson, looking beyond the basketball team blunder, pointed out the absurdity of the underlying conspiracy theory about Smith meeting Willis. “Just to be clear,” Nelson wrote, “even if Schmitt had gotten his teams right, his smoking gun was that two people were in a city of 6.5M at the same time?”
For his part, Sen. Schmitt has refused to apologize to Smith and has downplayed his blunder. He later appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show, where one of the hosts repeated Schmitt’s “dirtbag” comment and praised Schmitt, saying “you called him out, too, on this NBA game in Atlanta,” calling it “a great moment” and completely ignoring the real-time fact checking of Schmitt’s allegations.
The quickly falsified accusations against Smith, and the attempt to link him to the Willis scandal, is the latest attempt by allies of President Trump to attack Trump’s political opponents and those who have investigated him. Smith, who was appointed as special counsel in 2022 by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, investigated Trump concerning both Trump’s retention of classified and sensitive documents after leaving the White House in 2021 and Trump’s alleged attempt to interfere with the certification of the 2020 presidential election results, ultimately culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol Hill insurrection. Although Smith has repeatedly asserted that he believes there was sufficient evidence to convict Trump in both cases, the charges filed against Trump were dropped after Trump won the 2024 presidential election. Republicans have consistently attacked Smith’s investigation and his character, with several GOP senators doing so again during Tuesday’s hearing; Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Tuesday called Smith’s investigation of Trump and his allies “the most egregious abuse of power in the history of the Department of Justice,” without offering evidence for this assertion. Willis, meanwhile, led a separate investigation out of her Fulton County office into Trump and his allies for interfering with the 2020 election in Georgia. The scandal over her relationship with Wade eventually led to Willis being removed from the case, which essentially brought the investigation to a halt. Now that the case has been closed, Trump and his allies are attempting to recoup millions of dollars in legal fees from the case, with Willis opposing the effort.
Schmitt’s doubling down on his hostility against Smith, even after the heart of his accusation was immediately proven false, reflects the animosity that Republicans have against Smith and other opponents of Trump. While Schmitt’s attempt to catch Smith in a scandal or a lie quickly backfired, many conservative Trump supporters seem intent on protecting Trump, and they do not appear to be willing to let facts get in the way of their attacks against Trump’s adversaries.