LIKE A HAWK

MAGA Senator Humiliates Himself With Botched Gotcha Moment

He’s just been tipped as JD Vance’s “intelligent” running mate—then the wheels came off.

MAGA Senator Eric Schmitt dramatically accused former special counsel Jack Smith of perjury and being a “dirtbag” on Tuesday—only to learn he got his reveal entirely wrong.

Instead Schmitt was publicly humiliated, just as D.C. was gossiping that he could be a running mate for JD Vance in 2028.

The cringeworthy exchange came when the Missouri Republican started asking Smith about attending a basketball game in Atlanta in 2024.

He appeared to be trying to tie the former special counsel to the separate election interference case with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.

Smith appeared confused at first by the line of questioning, but it turned out that Schmitt completely mixed up the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks with the Hawkeyes from the University of Iowa.

Schmitt was tipped as a running mate for JD Vance in the 2028 election just hours earlier, by Trump-friendly email bulletin Axios. It described him as “trustworthy, intelligent, articulate and a deft political operator.” The Schmitt, a graduate of Missouri’s Truman State University and the Saint Louis University School of Law, who held a series of offices in his Republican-majority state, got to question Harvard-educated Smith.

Smith was appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a grilling over his investigations into Trump’s involvement in the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, and keeping the nation’s most highly guarded secrets after he left office, and stashing them in his Mar-a-Lago bathroom.

“Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?” Schmitt asked.

“What state would that be in?” Smith asked, looking confused.

“Atlanta,” Schmitt said.

“No,” Smith responded.

“So your testimony today is that you did not go to a Hawks game on February 3rd, 2024. Is that correct?” Schmitt asked.

“I have no recollection of that,” Smith confirmed.

“Okay, is it your testimony that you were not in Atlanta on February 3, 2024?” he asked, as Smith continued to look puzzled. “Let me just give you a little context. The day before Fani Willis came clean about her affair with the prosecutor, you know the Atlanta prosecutor that was also trying to get Trump. The next day, were you in Atlanta?”

“I do not believe so,” Smith said.

Schmitt asked if Smith had ever gone to Atlanta as special counsel. Smith said he did not believe he had, but could have had a layover at the airport.

“I definitely did not go to a Hawks game,” Smith said.

He also denied ever meeting with Willis or special prosecutor Nathan Wade as special counsel.

“What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta for a Warriors-Hawks game on February 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?” Schmitt asked. “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 perjure yourself.”

At that point, one of Schmitt’s staffers, with Sen. John Kennedy’s help, held up a poster that appeared to have text messages on it, but it was quickly taken down before Smith could read it.

When asked to put it back up and give Smith a chance to read it, Schmitt tried to move on, claiming it would be in a follow-up.

“I think you’ve already perjured yourself,” Schmitt declared. Schmitt also described himself as a “former prosecutor,” omitting to mention that he had never been a career prosecutor, but was elected as Missouri’s attorney general once, while Smith, 57, worked as a prosecutor after leaving Harvard until he was fired as special counsel by Trump.

Democrats were furious and demanded to see the texts, which had been whipped out of sight as the fiasco became clear, but the Missouri Republican pushed to move on. At the end of his time questioning Smith, he called the former special prosecutor a villain and said, “You will go down as a total dirtbag.”

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But Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar, who was next up for questioning, wasn’t ready to let the bizarre line of questioning and accusations go.

She asked that Smith be allowed to review the alleged texts placing him in Atlanta. Smith then said he could address it, and Schmitt’s epic mistake was revealed.

“If this is the correct basketball game, I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time, and the Marshal Service was there with me. You can check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa I think of February 2024,” Smith said. “You can check that out if that’s what we’re talking about.”

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“Could it then be that the University of Iowa is the Hawkeyes? Could that be it?” Klobuchar asked.

“It was because Caitlin Clark was coming to Maryland to play,” Smith explained.

“That might be the confusion over the names of the team, but perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully,” she admonished her Missouri colleague.

Schmitt jumped in and accused her of trying to rehabilitate the witness, but Klobuchar was not having it.

“You are calling a witness a dirtbag,” Klobuchar blasted him.

“I presented him with text messages about him wanting to meet with people that could have obviously been related to the prosecution that was coordinated with his office in Atlanta,” Schmitt argued.

“I think people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag,” Klobuchar fired back.

Schmitt said he stood by his statement, but Klobuchar had one more dig at the Missouri senator at the end of her own questioning of Smith.

“We have confirmed that in fact you were right Mr. Smith. Iowa, the Iowa Hawkeyes played Maryland on February 3, 2024. The final score was 93 to 85. Iowa won, and Caitlin Clark scored over, scored 30 points, so it must have been a pretty good game,” Klobuchar said.

“The game was, in fact, in Maryland, Mr. Smith, and I would just say for a U.S. senator to have false information and imply, based on the 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,” the Minnesota Democrat said.

At another strange moment in the hearing, Republican Sen. John Kennedy asked the former special counsel about a series of characters.

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“Do you believe in the tooth fairy?” Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy asked him.

“I do not,” Smith responded seriously.

“How about the Easter bunny?” Kennedy asked.

“I no longer believe in the Easter bunny,” Smith said.

The GOP senator, known for eccentric questioning, then asked if he believed Jimmy Hoffa died of natural causes.

“I do not,” Smith said.

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Sarah Ewall-WicePolitical Reporter

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