Sen. Eric Schmitt thought he had Jack Smith cornered.
The Missouri Republican arrived at Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing armed with text messages, a poster board and what appeared to be a carefully prepared “gotcha” designed to catch the former special counsel in a lie.
Instead, he walked straight into a disaster.
And now even one of Fox News’ most prominent political voices is weighing in.
“He brought this on himself and deserves the obloquy,” Fox’s chief political analyst Brit Hume wrote on X, responding to an AI-generated image mocking Schmitt over the spectacularly awkward exchange.
The episode began when Schmitt confronted Smith over whether he had attended an Atlanta Hawks game against the Golden State Warriors in Atlanta on Feb. 3, 2024.
Schmitt suggested he had evidence placing Smith at the game and appeared to be trying to establish that Smith had secretly traveled to Atlanta around the time Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was facing scrutiny over her relationship with prosecutor Nathan Wade.
Then Smith denied attending the game.
Schmitt doubled down.
“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.
He then presented text messages that he said supported his claim.
It looked, for a moment, like Schmitt was preparing to drop a political bombshell.
There was just one problem.
Smith hadn’t been at an Atlanta Hawks game.
He had attended a University of Iowa women’s basketball game against Maryland in College Park, Maryland, where star player Caitlin Clark was playing.
The Iowa team is the Hawkeyes.
The Atlanta NBA team is the Hawks.
Schmitt appeared to have confused the two.
And once that became clear, the senator’s dramatic presentation started looking considerably less dramatic.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat with some knowledge of Midwestern sports, quickly zeroed in on the problem.
“Could it then be that the University of Iowa was the Hawkeyes?” she asked.
She later confirmed the game details: Iowa played Maryland in Maryland on Feb. 3, 2024, with Clark scoring 30 points in Iowa’s 93-85 victory.
So much for Atlanta.
The mistake might have been embarrassing enough on its own.
But Schmitt had already raised the stakes considerably.
During the exchange, he told Smith that he believed he had caught him in a false statement and called him a “total dirtbag.”
Klobuchar later said that was precisely why the error demanded an apology.
“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,” she said, “and then call you a dirtbag is something that deserves an apology.”
Schmitt did not apologize.
Instead, he went on conservative media and continued defending the exchange.
Schmitt also refused to simply concede that he had made a mistake when confronted afterward.
When a reporter pointed out that video showed Smith at the Iowa-Maryland game, Schmitt responded:
“Great. Well, then he was at the Hawkeyes game.”
He later joked about Smith being a Caitlin Clark fan.
But the joke didn’t erase the original problem.
That’s where Hume’s reaction becomes particularly notable.
Hume wasn’t writing from the Democratic side of the aisle.
He is Fox News’ chief political analyst and a veteran conservative commentator.
Yet when presented with an image mocking Schmitt over the incident, Hume didn’t try to rescue the senator.
He delivered a remarkably blunt verdict: “He brought this on himself and deserves the obloquy.”
