A Republican senator accused Jack Smith of perjury on live television Tuesday over a basketball game. He had the wrong basketball game. He had the wrong sport, actually, and a Democratic senator looked it up while he was still talking.
The gotcha
Sen. Eric Schmitt, Republican of Missouri, was trying to establish that Smith had been in Atlanta on February 3, 2024, the day after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis disclosed her relationship with prosecutor Nathan Wade. The implication was coordination.
So he asked whether Smith attended an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks that day.
Smith seemed puzzled about what city that would even be in. The only game he remembered around then, he said, was a University of Maryland women’s basketball game against the Iowa Hawkeyes, in College Park, Maryland, featuring Caitlin Clark.
Schmitt pressed on anyway.
I think you’ve already perjured yourself.
Sen. Eric Schmitt
He later added that Smith would go down in history as a total dirtbag.
Klobuchar looked it up
Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota checked the schedule during the hearing and confirmed that Iowa played Maryland on February 3, 2024. Smith’s account was correct.
For a U.S. senator to have false information and call you a dirtbag is something that deserves an apology.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar
The apparent error: Hawks and Hawkeyes.
Schmitt declined to apologize, telling NBC News that a prosecutor would be the one to determine perjury. He then posted on X: who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan. He has since said the line of questioning was not a mistake.
Schmitt was not the only one
Sen. Darline Graham, sister of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died in July at 71, went after Smith for obtaining her brother’s phone records.
She told him he had tried to bully her brother and other allies of the president, and that he had caused her brother and a lot of other senators a lot of stress. Then she asked the question.
So Mr. Smith, do you really believe that Lindsey was going to destroy evidence that was not even in his possession?
Sen. Darline Graham
Smith’s answer did not go where she wanted.
No, I believe your brother was a patriotic public servant. He was not a target of our investigation, and in fact, he likely would have been a witness in our case.
Jack Smith
The problem for Graham is what made him a potential witness rather than a target: Lindsey Graham had looked into Trump’s voter fraud claims himself and concluded they were false. Her defense of her brother ran directly into the fact that her brother had not believed the thing she was there to defend.
She told Smith he should be ashamed of himself.
The rest of the hearing, which was the actual news
The basketball clip traveled. The testimony under it mattered more.
Smith told the Senate Judiciary Committee he stands by the decision to charge Trump.
Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation.
Jack Smith, former special counsel
He said he would make the same call again.
If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.
Jack Smith
- Smith said he made his decisions without regard to Trump’s political activities, beliefs or 2024 candidacy.
- He said the rule of law faces challenges unlike any in our lifetime, pointing at threats of prosecution aimed at people the president sees as enemies.
- He criticized the firings of Justice Department prosecutors as illegal.
- He said he will not be silenced by continued threats of prosecution against him.
The full hearing runs on https://www.c-span.org/event/senate-committee/fmr-special-counsel-jack-smith-testifies-on-allegations-of-targeting-gop-lawmakers/447548.
The BeezLoop Take
The Hawks-Hawkeyes thing is funny and it is also the least important part, and the people replaying it on loop are doing Schmitt a favor. A senator who cannot keep an NBA franchise straight from a women’s college team is embarrassing for an afternoon. A senator who walked into a nationally televised hearing prepared to accuse a witness of a felony without checking the underlying fact is a different problem, and it lasts.
That is the part worth staying on. Perjury is a criminal accusation. Schmitt made it on the record, in a Senate hearing, against a former federal prosecutor, on the basis of a date and a sports team that took Klobuchar under a minute to check with a phone. Then he declined to apologize and said it was not a mistake. The failure was not the mix-up. It was deciding the accusation did not need verifying before it was made.
We would say the same about a Democrat doing this to a Trump appointee, and the test is simple: would you accept “a prosecutor will determine whether it was perjury” as a response from a senator who had just falsely accused someone you like? It is a way of keeping the accusation alive after its basis collapsed.
And the substance got buried, which is usually the point of a stunt even when the stunt fails. Smith said under oath that his investigation found proof beyond a reasonable doubt that a sitting president committed serious crimes against the country, and that he would charge him again tomorrow. Whatever you think of Smith, that is a former special counsel putting his conclusion on the record while the man he investigated runs the Justice Department. It deserved more than a day of highlight-reel coverage about a basketball game.
The question
If a senator accuses a witness of a felony on national television and is disproven in under a minute, what is the consequence? And why did a hearing about whether prosecutions were politicized end up being covered as a sports trivia error?
Related: Hegseth ordered Cyber Command to defend the midterms, and Trump sued a pollster for being wrong and an Iowa judge said being wrong is not fraud.
Sources: C-SPAN, full hearing video · NBC News · PBS NewsHour · The Hill · Washington Examiner
