Sen. Eric Schmitt appeared to have Jack Smith exactly where he wanted him.
The Missouri Republican senator had a poster, a series of text messages and what looked like a carefully prepared line of questioning designed to put the former special counsel on the defensive.
But there was a problem.
What was supposed to be a dramatic “gotcha” moment against Smith instead unraveled into one of the more embarrassing exchanges of the Senate hearing — after Schmitt appeared to confuse the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes.
Schmitt had asked Smith whether he attended an Atlanta Hawks NBA game against the Golden State Warriors in Atlanta on Feb. 3, 2024.
Smith said no.
That apparently wasn’t the answer Schmitt was expecting.
“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, you know, perjure yourself,” Schmitt told him.
The senator then displayed a poster containing text messages from Smith’s team and suggested the messages showed Smith had been in Atlanta.
For a moment, Schmitt seemed convinced he had landed his punch.
He hadn’t.
Smith said he did remember attending a basketball game around that time — but it wasn’t an Atlanta Hawks game.
It was a University of Iowa women’s basketball game against Maryland in College Park, Maryland, where Caitlin Clark was playing.
And that’s when the entire premise of Schmitt’s questioning began to fall apart.
“Could it then be that the University of Iowa was the Hawkeyes?” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asked.
That was the hiccup.
The Iowa team was the Hawkeyes.
The Atlanta team was the Hawks.
And the two games were roughly 650 miles apart.
Schmitt had apparently built his line of questioning around the wrong basketball team.
That’s when the conspiracy theory fell apart.
The basketball question wasn’t random.
Schmitt appeared to be trying to place Smith in Atlanta at a politically sensitive moment involving Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and Nathan Wade, the prosecutor who worked on the Georgia case against Trump.
The implication was that Smith’s presence in Atlanta could somehow help establish a connection between his federal investigation and the Georgia prosecution.
But Smith told the committee that he never met Willis or Wade during his time as special counsel.
And the game Schmitt appeared to be referencing wasn’t even in Georgia. It was in Maryland.
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) accused Schmitt of presenting a “false narrative” about Smith’s whereabouts and suggested the questioning was intended to advance a broader conspiracy theory.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) was even more blunt.
The information Schmitt presented was “just wrong,” Schiff said, adding that he was glad Smith was able to “set the record straight.”
“To show a witness a document and then not let them see it is a terrible practice, but then also not to know the facts is a bigger problem,” Schiff said.
And Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) couldn’t resist the obvious punchline.
“Going to a basketball game? That’s a sketchy activity for a prosecutor,” Welch joked. “Nefarious things are going on.”
The most remarkable part of the exchange was that Schmitt didn’t simply ask about the game and move on.
After accusing Smith of potentially perjuring himself, Schmitt called him a “dirtbag.”
“You may think you’re a hero in this story, but let me tell you something. You’re the villain,” Schmitt told him.
That made the eventual mix-up even harder to ignore.
Klobuchar later fact-checked the entire sports schedule during the hearing.
“We have confirmed that, in fact, you are right, Mr. Smith,” she said, before explaining that Iowa played Maryland on Feb. 3, 2024, in Maryland.
Clark scored 30 points.
Iowa won 93-85.
And, perhaps most importantly for the Senate hearing, the game was not in Atlanta.
“For a U.S. senator to have false information and imply, based on a confusion about the name of a team … that you were in another city,” Klobuchar said, “and then call you a dirtbag is something that deserves an apology.”
Schmitt has not offered one.
Instead, he has continued defending the exchange.
After the hearing, Schmitt rejected the suggestion that the questioning was simply a mistake, telling reporters, “There’s not a mistake.”
He later joked about Smith being a Caitlin Clark fan and argued that his role was simply to ask the question.
That defense hasn’t stopped the episode from becoming a viral political embarrassment.
Some conservative media personalities initially celebrated Schmitt’s questioning as if he had caught Smith in a lie.
Conservative influencer Benny Johnson posted that Schmitt had “CAUGHT Jack Smith perjuring himself” and had “pulled out the receipts.”
The post was later deleted.
Fox News host Sean Hannity also appeared to post about the exchange before deleting his post, according to reporting by The Washington Post.
Schmitt subsequently discussed the confrontation on “The Charlie Kirk Show,” where the segment focused heavily on his side of the exchange while not showing Smith’s full explanation of the Maryland game.
The episode also landed at an awkward moment for Schmitt’s political ambitions.
Just hours before the hearing, Axios reported that the Missouri senator could potentially be considered as a running mate for Vice President JD Vance if Vance seeks the presidency in 2028.
Then Schmitt walked into a nationally televised hearing, accused a former federal prosecutor of lying under oath, threatened him with perjury, called him a “dirtbag” — and appeared to have confused two completely different basketball teams.
That’s quite a sequence.
Democrats were quick to seize on it.
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) described the broader Republican effort against Smith as “ham-handed,” arguing that Republicans were attempting to misrepresent Smith’s investigation.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) accused Republicans on the committee of “gaslighting” the public.
But the most devastating criticism may have come from Schmitt’s fellow senator and fellow Midwesterner.
Klobuchar didn’t need a complicated political argument. She simply checked the schedule.
Iowa played Maryland. In Maryland. Caitlin Clark scored 30. And there was no Atlanta Hawks game involving Jack Smith.
Schmitt wanted a smoking gun. Instead, he airballed the whole thing.
