Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri walked into Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing convinced he was about to catch Jack Smith in a lie. He walked out as the senator who confused the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes on national television, accused a former special counsel of a felony over a basketball game he could not correctly identify, and then refused to admit he had gotten a single thing wrong.
The hearing was supposed to be the Senate GOP’s big swing at the man who indicted Donald Trump twice. Schmitt, a former Missouri attorney general, claimed to have text message evidence placing Smith at an Atlanta Hawks game against the Golden State Warriors in February 2024, a night that, in Schmitt’s telling, fell right before Fani Willis acknowledged her relationship with Nathan Wade, the special prosecutor she hired for the Georgia election case against Trump. The insinuation was that Smith had slipped into Atlanta to coordinate with the prosecutors going after Trump in Georgia.
Schmitt was so sure of himself that he started narrating his own victory in real time. “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff,” he told Smith. Then: “I will give you a second to process so you don’t perjure yourself.” And finally, the big one: “I think you’ve already perjured yourself.”
Smith, visibly baffled, said he could not recall being in Atlanta during that stretch and definitely never attended a Hawks game. What he did remember was attending “a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing” right around that time.
Anyone who watched five seconds of sports in early 2024 can spot the problem. Caitlin Clark did not play for the Atlanta Hawks. She did not play in the NBA at all. She was the most famous basketball player in the country at that moment, starring for the Iowa Hawkeyes women’s team, which visited Maryland that February. Hawks. Hawkeyes. That, apparently, was the entire investigation.
A Poster Board, Secret Texts, And No Actual Game
The stagecraft somehow made it worse. Schmitt’s staff briefly hoisted a poster board of the supposed smoking gun texts, then pulled it down before anyone in the room could read it, and Schmitt initially refused to show the messages to Smith or the Democrats demanding he do so. When he finally relented, the texts turned out to be messages that never mention a basketball team, a ticket, or a game of any kind. One prosecutor on Smith’s team books a meeting room. Another staffer replies that Smith is “already down here.” That is it. That is the perjury.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar did what Schmitt’s office apparently could not and looked up the actual game. After confirming the details of the Iowa at Maryland matchup, she told Schmitt that people should get their facts straight before accusing someone of being a dirtbag, “and not get the teams wrong.” Klobuchar said Schmitt owed Smith an apology before the hearing ended, and none ever came.
Sen. Mazie Hirono put it plainly, saying the committee had just watched “a false narrative” built around a game Smith “was nowhere near,” all in service of some imagined conspiracy.
Schmitt Would Rather Call Smith A Liar Than Read A Box Score
The truly humiliating part came after the gavel. Cornered by reporters in the hallway, Schmitt dug in on the accusation and somehow made it worse, explaining that his office had settled on Atlanta because it hosted “the only NBA game or men’s college basketball game that night.” Read that again. His team checked the NBA schedule and the men’s college slate and stopped. Women’s basketball never entered their minds, even as the biggest name in the entire sport was on the floor in College Park.
Asked directly whether he might have had his information wrong, Schmitt would not say yes. He insisted the texts, which his office still has not made public, related to Smith being at a basketball game that night. Then came the pivot every Republican reaches for when the facts collapse: “Jack Smith has lied before.” He added that Smith “tried to jail the president of the United States” and that he has no sympathy for the man. Every word except the two that mattered: I’m sorry, or even, I was wrong.
MAGA media, naturally, ran the wrong version of the story. Right wing engagement accounts recast the flop as a triumph within minutes, with Benny Johnson claiming Schmitt had caught Smith perjuring himself and left him stunned, while Sean Hannity boosted the clip and then quietly deleted it. Several prominent MAGA influencers seemed not to notice the mistake at all as the moment went viral for the opposite reason.
Maybe Learn The League You Keep Attacking
Here is the thing that elevates this from funny clip to perfect metaphor. Republicans have spent the last few years treating the WNBA and women’s basketball as a culture war punching bag, sneering at the league, its players, and its fans at every opportunity. Then a Republican senator built an actual perjury accusation on a basketball game, and women’s hoops was so far outside his universe that his own staff never thought to check whether Caitlin Clark, the player Smith named out loud, might have been playing that night. For a party that spends this much energy blasting the WNBA, you would think by now at least one of them would know the teams.
This is the entire GOP oversight project compressed into one exchange. Jack Smith sat under oath for hours and answered everything they threw at him. Eric Schmitt accused him of a felony on live television, botched the most basic fact in his own evidence, hid that evidence from the man he was accusing, and then called Smith a liar on his way out the door. They are not looking for the truth. They are looking for a clip. On Tuesday, Schmitt finally got one. It just was not the clip he wanted.
