“What was your most embarrassing day at work?” is a staple question of internet forums, and the answers tend to converge around the accidental reply-all, the mortifying shared-bathroom incident, or congratulating a colleague on their pregnancy, only to discover the bump was instead the result of a large lunch.
Luckily for Senator Eric Schmitt, though, he operates in a political environment that has selected for blowhards with bulletproof confidence and slavish devotion to Donald Trump. So the Missouri Republican probably didn’t wake up at 3 a.m., reliving the terrible moment in yesterday’s Senate Judiciary hearing when his attempted gotcha of former Special Counsel Jack Smith fell apart spectacularly. A hundred minutes into the hearing, Schmitt had his smoking gun ready to go. He wanted to prove that the witness, who had been appointed by the Department of Justice under the Biden administration to investigate Trump’s election interference, had surreptitiously met Fani Willis. She is the district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, who brought separate charges against Trump and 18 others for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election results in her state. Perhaps Smith and Willis had even illicitly coordinated their witch hunt against everyone’s favorite president?
“Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?” the senator asked Smith, who understandably looked bemused. “What city would that be in?” Smith replied. “Atlanta,” said Schmitt. “No,” said Smith.
Aha! With a look of quiet triumph, Schmitt noted that February 3 was the day after Willis admitted having a relationship with her deputy, Nathan Wade. Smith continued to look puzzled. What did this have to do with him?
Schmitt tried again: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior Hawks game on February 3, 2020—the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?”
At this point, a Schmitt staffer began to manhandle a cardboard prop showing the texts. “I don’t think you know that we have this stuff,” the senator said, looking smug, “so I will give you a second to process it, so you don’t perjure yourself.” But the cardboard was already being unhoisted and tucked away. “You just took that down really quick,” Smith observed—prompting the Democrats on the committee to heckle Schmitt to bring it out again. “This is my time,” snapped Schmitt. He ended his performance by declaring that Smith would go down in history as a “total dirtbag” who had committed perjury.
Dunk achieved! Send the tweet! Book the one-on-one with Jesse Watters! Unfortunately for Schmitt, Senator Amy Klobuchar also sits on the committee. This is a woman who reportedly ate a salad with a comb when her staffer couldn’t supply a fork. The Minnesota Democrat is not easily deterred when faced with minor obstacles. She asked Senator Chuck Grassley, the committee’s Republican chair, to “allow the witness to see this vast poster board that we saw.” The staffers once again held it aloft, whereupon everyone could see that the supposedly incriminating texts said nothing about Willis at all. But at least now Smith recognized the basketball game that the messages referred to; he remembered going to see the WNBA’s Caitlin Clark, then a star at the University of Iowa, in a game against the University of Maryland.
The penny dropped first with Klobuchar. “Could it be,” she asked, “the University of Iowa is—the Hawkeyes?”
On a different feed, the camera crash-zoomed on to Alabama Republican Katie Britt’s face, her mouth agape as she absorbed the terrible possibility that her GOP colleague had confused the Hawks and the Hawkeyes.
Eric Schmitt was first elected to the Senate in 2022, having made his name as attorney general in Missouri opposing COVID restrictions, trying to roll back Obamacare, and joining an effort led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to invalidate the votes of four states that went for Joe Biden in 2020. That makes him a lab-grown Trump-era Republican, with the thirst for attention and resistance to shame that inevitably entails. The committee meeting provided an exciting chance for him and other Republicans to demonstrate their loyalty to the president, by enthusiastically endorsing his belief that he was robbed of victory in 2020.
[Kathy Gilsinan: Missouri is the next front in the COVID culture war]
Yesterday could have been Schmitt’s big day. Senate committee hearings are usually long and often dull, but they do offer senators a chance to get their faces on TV, both during the session itself, and in post-game interviews on cable news. Ahead of the hearing, Axios ran a short article suggesting that Schmitt “is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028.” Buzz from whom, exactly? The item sadly failed to name any names. But people in Schmitt’s camp plainly hoped that the hearing would raise his profile. If so, mission accomplished!
The hearing certainly wasn’t aimed at anyone who sincerely wanted to understand the attempts to undo the 2020 election result, or the conduct of those tasked with investigating those allegations. As special counsel, Jack Smith brought dozens of felony charges against Donald Trump over his alleged election interference, and his mishandling of classified documents stored haphazardly at Mar-a-Lago. Trump pleaded not guilty. After he was re-elected in 2024, Smith dropped the cases and resigned. Whatever Trump did or didn’t do, he got away with it.
Grassley didn’t bother to hide the fact that this was, at heart, a revenge beating. At minimum, Senate Republicans hoped to subject Smith to an invasive and stressful experience, the kind of shellacking that might make other prosecutors reconsider ever taking on a politically sensitive case. They also wanted more data points to feed into the right-wing conspiracy machine; fresh ways to activate the tribal loyalty of the MAGA faithful as Trump’s approval ratings nosedive. In his opening statement, Grassley argued that Smith’s investigation had far exceeded its legal authority, and turned into an attempt to “map out and target the entire Republican Party.” The stretch goal was entrapping Smith into perjury.
Before we return to Eric Schmitt, may we have a moment’s appreciation for Ted Cruz’s performance as Man Shocked to Hear His Party Accused of Wrongdoing? Three hours into the hearing, the Texas senator delivered a series of zingers designed to be clipped up for later use. “Is it a crime to be a Republican?” he asked Smith. Over several minutes, Cruz worked himself up into a lather: “I understand for the rest of your life you are going to be hailed as a hero in the Resistance Movement,” he told Smith. “I assume you have a pink hat somewhere at home.” A pussy hat reference—how retro! However, this lib endorsement would be no consolation, he suggested to Smith, for bringing the Department of Justice into disrepute. Here I would briefly note that the current head of the FBI, Kash Patel, has his own branded bourbon, and that he recently had to defend waiving the ban on bestiality among FBI recruits. The American justice system may have more pressing reputational problems.
[Sarah Fitzpatrick: Kash Patel’s personalized bourbon stash]
Throughout his remarks, Cruz’s staffers brandished cardboard props with headlines about Smith’s investigation, while the witness adopted a poker face, perhaps recognizing that he was merely an extra in the courtroom drama being scripted in Cruz’s head. The senator’s staffers should confiscate his John Grisham collection—and his DVD of Les Misérables. “Javert from Les Mis would look at you with astonishment,” Cruz thundered at Smith, finger aloft. (Inspector Javert, played by Russell Crowe in the film adaptation of the musical, pursues Hugh Jackman’s repentant Jean Valjean for many years over the theft of a piece of bread.) Cruz has used a similar line before. Last year, he told Pam Bondi, then the Republican nominee for attorney general, that there were so many prosecutions of Trump that “Javert from Les Mis would be chagrined.” Branch out a little, Senator—give us something from Cats.
Still, if Cruz was showing poor attention to detail by repeating himself, then Eric Schmitt was there to say, Hold my cardboard prop. Within hours of the hearing, the Missouri senator was explaining to TMZ that what looked like a fist-bitingly awkward gaffe was no such thing. “How did that mistake happen?” asked the reporter. “It wasn’t a mistake,” he replied. “I asked him if he was in Atlanta.” In a hallway interview, he told CNN: “Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?” This came across as a dig at the special prosecutor for liking ladies’ basketball rather than real manly basketball, or perhaps at the very idea of a weenie lawyer being a sports aficionado. Regardless, Schmitt thought the line was such a zinger that he repeated it in a tweet.
Some MAGA influencers fully embraced the idea that Schmitt had, in fact, completed le epic pwn of Smith. On The Charlie Kirk Show—still named for its late creator—one of the hosts played the clip of Schmitt’s question, after telling the senator he had to “give you some flowers” for his acuity. The whole segment appeared to have been beamed in from a parallel reality where the exchange with Smith had gone well for the senator. “It was the only NBA or NCAA men’s game going on at that time in Atlanta,” said Schmitt. “He claimed later that he was at another game. I don’t know. Now here’s the thing—my job is to ask the questions.” This explanation opens up the possibility that the reason Schmitt and his team didn’t think Smith could be referring to the Hawkeyes was because they had forgotten the existence of the WNBA. Not a great look for a party that has made a crusade lately of protecting women’s sports.
Other stars in the MAGA universe, however, seemed to realize that Schmitt’s failed gotcha would not delight their faithful, even if they could not say so out loud. The former journalist Benny Johnson, who has 4 million followers on X, posted that Schmitt had “pulled out the receipts” and left Smith “stunned.” Later, he deleted that post, without explanation. On Fox, Sean Hannity’s recap of the hearing left out Schmitt’s screw-up but included a megamix of Republicans shouting at Smith, including Louisiana Republican John Kennedy telling the former special counsel that “you make me want to throw up in my mouth.”
This is, to be blunt, not a healthy ecosystem. People love to complain about media outlets being overly hostile to certain politicians, but that adversarial mode is far preferable to the hermetically sealed MAGA universe, in which a politician says something dumb and his error is either silently erased from the record or even rewritten as a triumph. The Republicans on the committee complained endlessly that Jack Smith’s investigation was little more than a fishing expedition, trawling their personal communications for tenuous evidence of wrongdoing—while doing exactly that to Smith himself. Eric Schmitt had some red string, and a corkboard, and by God he was going to add data points to it until the connections spell out DEEP STATE PLOT. So what if it went badly? Trapped in their bubble, his base would never know.