Former special counsel Jack Smith appeared on Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. During that session, Sen. Eric Schmitt accused him of perjury over where Smith was on Feb. 3, 2024.
According to MS NOW, Schmitt said he had text messages from Smith’s team placing Smith in Atlanta at a Warriors-Hawks game that night. He held up a poster board he said contained those messages and asked Smith to respond.
Smith said he was not in Atlanta and did not attend that game. Schmitt then accused him of lying under oath and called him a “dirtbag.” However, it was later revealed that Smith had mixed up the details.
Klobuchar said the accusation rested on the wrong basketball teams
“You have weaponized the Department of Justice against political enemies to an extent that has never happened in the history of this country,” Schmitt said. “You will go down as a total dirtbag.”
Schmitt said the date mattered because it came one day after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade acknowledged a romantic relationship. Willis had investigated efforts to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia.
Schmitt asked, “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 Feb. 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?”
Smith said he recalled a different game that day. He said he attended a women’s college basketball game in Maryland between the University of Maryland Terrapins and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar challenged Schmitt over that difference. “I think that people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag, and not get the teams wrong,” she said.
Klobuchar later said, “I would just say, for a U.S. senator to have false information and imply, based on a confusion about the name of a team – which I knew, knowing my Midwestern sports – and imply that you were in another city, that you were somehow involved that day in what was happening in Georgia, and then call you a dirtbag, is something that deserves an apology.”
Schmitt’s office did not immediately respond to questions about where he got the information used in the hearing. For Schmitt, the scrutiny of his claims doesn’t stop at the hearing, as Fox News once aired outdated ballroom photos that Trump called out.
After the session, Schmitt appeared on The Charlie Kirk Show. Host Andrew Kolvet called it a “great moment” when the senator “caught [Smith] out on this NBA game.” The same line of questioning came up again later in that interview. Neither Kolvet nor Schmitt addressed the team names during the appearance.
Schmitt later told HuffPost that Smith could have lied. “It was the only game – Atlanta was the only NBA game or men’s college basketball game that night at 7:30,” Schmitt said. Smith testified that the game he attended was a women’s college basketball game.
Sen. Ted Cruz was asked about the exchange outside the hearing room and declined to discuss it. “Since I didn’t see the exchange, I’m not going to comment on an exchange I didn’t see,” Cruz said. Cruz has shown a willingness to praise Republican courage, such as when he praised Trump’s fearlessness on Sean Hannity’s podcast.
