The most salient part of the accusation that Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt lodged against former special prosecutor Jack Smith in a Senate hearing on Tuesday is that it was wrong. It was ecstatically and grandiosely wrong, and obviously wrong in ways that even a rudimentary blog-level fact check would have caught. It was wrong in ways that would only be possible at this particular low ebb in American political and broader executive function—based on unverified and unvetted information given only to Republican Senators by the Department of Justice, too-hastily put to oafish misuse by well-credentialed chumps of roughly equal laziness and ambition in the pursuit of a spiteful but otherwise opaque end.
In that sense, it is extremely familiar. If it hadn't ended with Schmitt dangling upside down and blustering like the previously undiscovered suburban version of Yosemite Sam after becoming ensnared in his own malfunctioning perjury trap, it might not even have been news at all. In absolute terms, it was as stupid as more or less anything that's happened on the floor of the United States Senate in a century or so, a half-assed 16x-speed gloss on McCarthyism from people who do not really know what that or anything else was, and whose attention spans have left them incapable of parsing even your wordier memes. In relative terms, this is just what our government is like much of the time.
It is not difficult to see what Schmitt was trying to do, and it is extremely easy to see how and why he and his staff of pale and chittering Renfields screwed it up. That failure is grounded in a tragicomic lack of Ball Knowledge, but also in either a more overtly comic inattention to detail, an aversion to even light investigative work, or both. Schmitt et al went through the DOJ's dump of Smith's text messages and believed they had found evidence of him secretly attending an Atlanta Hawks home game against the Golden State Warriors on Feb. 3, 2024. Accusing someone of attending a Hawks game is rude on the merits, but neither libelous nor scandalous in its own right; why Schmitt believed this was newsworthy, let alone a suitably bouncy springboard to soft-launch his own Vice Presidential ambitions, is something else entirely.
But the facts of it are plain: the text messages Schmitt presented as evidence of Smith having attended that game do not prove that. The seat in question, 109 C, is not one that even exists at Hawks home games. Seat 109 CC does exist at Hawks games, and is a good enough seat that Smith probably would have been visible in the television broadcast of that game, in which Steph Curry scored 60 points in a losing effort and Patty Mills put up zero stats of any kind in seven minutes for the victorious Hawks.
As it turns out, Seat 109 C at the Xfinity Center in College Park, Maryland is also a pretty good seat, and there is indeed video of Smith sitting in those seats on Feb. 3, 2024, where he and a sellout crowd of nearly 18,000 watched Caitlin Clark's Iowa Hawkeyes defeat the University of Maryland. Schmitt conflated the Hawks and the Hawkeyes, blew past Smith's confused and appropriately heated denial upon having been accused of attending what many still remember as The Lester Quinones Game, and then called the former special prosecutor tasked with investigating Donald Trump's culpability in the (failed?) insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021 a "dirtbag." All of this, plus Schmitt getting really upset when Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar straightened out the Hawks/Hawkeyes thing, aired on C-Span, right where everyone could see it.
A phenomenal moment in the Senate.Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., claims he has evidence Jack Smith went to a HAWKS game in Atlanta.Smith denies it.Schmitt declares he has busted Jack Smith for perjury.Smith, vexed, says he went to HAWKEYES game in Maryland.WATCH IN FULL, UNINTERRUPTED
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur.bsky.social) 2026-09-29T15:54:16.518Z
"You did a great job," one of the hosts of The Charlie Kirk Show said to Schmitt as he made the media rounds later that day, referring to the bit where the Missouri Senator absolutely ate his balls on live television. "So, gotta give you some flowers here sir." Other conservative influencers, having started the car wash, simply proceeded through it before deleting their posts asserting that, in the tweeted and subsequently deleted words of Benny Johnson, Schmitt "just CAUGHT Jack Smith perjuring himself" and "pulled out the receipts" to prove it. The Kirk hosts ran the clip while editing Smith's response; the host chuckled and said "dang" when it was over. Schmitt went on to explain that the Hawks game Smith did not attend was "the only NBA or college basketball game happening in Atlanta that day," which is also not true but not important, and that his job "is to ask the questions, and if that's what his answer is, then that's what his answer is." That's also not true, at least in terms of what Senators are supposed to do or be for, but that vision of the gig is more relevant than anything Schmitt brought to light through his questioning.
All of this was in service of proving that Smith, a mid-major villain in the Donald Trump Cinematic Universe, had been in Atlanta on Feb. 3, which was just one day after a different prosecutor making a different case against Trump, the disgraced Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis, revealed that she'd been having an affair with one of her deputies on that case. The idea, to the extent one is in evidence, appears to be that Smith was in town to collude with Willis in some way, and that he had either done so while watching Clint Capela put up 17 points and 15 rebounds in 36 minutes, or some time before or after.
Schmitt did not present any other evidence of such a meeting, for obvious reasons, or of such a conspiracy existing at all. But it's worth taking a step back to consider the case that the former Missouri Attorney General seemed to have been trying to make, which was that Smith's presence in one of America's largest metro areas would itself have been compelling evidence of the sprawling and illegal conspiracy between various state and federal prosecutors to persecute Donald Trump. Had Smith actually been at that night's Hawks game, there would still have been less proof of that claim than there would have been that, for instance, Lester Quinones played significantly better with Jack Smith in attendance than not. Schmitt seemingly didn't have any other evidence that Smith and Willis had ever met, let alone what they might have spoken about. He simply tried and failed to place them in the same city at the same time and hit a few strained how-ya-like-me-now poses in his seat after. In that sense, if only in that sense, he was doing his job.
Most of the major endeavors of the second Trump term, which is to say the ones that have harmed the maximum number of people at home and abroad, have happened outside of traditional government processes. Not just longstanding programs but whole government functions were ended by fiat, dirty wars foreign and domestic began without being declared anywhere but social media, public health was reimagined on the fly into something like its opposite, and things that Congress had approved and appropriated for simply didn't happen because a few administration officials didn't want them to. Congress has mostly gone no further than expressing meek and qualified concerns about some of this, and instead has mostly pivoted with distressing ease into a new function as a sort of content-creation organ with vestigial governmental attributes. Senators like Schmitt or Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, who is helping Schmitt hold the sign in the photo atop this story and who informed Smith on Tuesday that he "[makes] me want to throw up in my mouth," spend much of their public-facing time making clippable video content. In an influencer-occupied government, the functions of elected and unelected officials converge on the same goal, which is making little videos for their distractible boss to watch on his phone, and later to watch other people talking about on his TV.
While it was surely humiliating for Schmitt to fail so badly at doing that part of his job, that should in no way diminish how humiliating it is when other members of his cohort succeed at it. The work of the government shrinks and narrows until it consists entirely of creating the sort of thuddingly obvious viral moments—someone getting CAUGHT when one of the good guys Pulls Out The Receipts—that Trump is wired to appreciate. This sort of thing, roughly stacked and loosely linked, combines to form the kind of ornate and open-ended soap opera storytelling that Trump likes, provided he is its main character and every twist in the story is about him.
It is true that none of it exactly adds up to anything, but also that is not really how Senators like Schmitt understand their job at this moment. The patient is very sick, very vain, and almost unbelievably stupid; his heirs and viziers are loose and at prey throughout the world, trying to do and take and damage as much as they can before any of the institutions notionally charged with stopping this sort of thing bestir themselves to interrupt or even mildly inconvenience that predation. Schmitt belongs to one such institution, but he is doing a very different job. He is there, like the rest of his cohort, to tell that patient a story about himself, one in which he is both always in danger and always and inevitably victorious. The story doesn't have to make sense, really; there is only one character in it who will ever matter, and Schmitt knows as much. He knows that his job is to keep the patient comfortable.
