It wasn’t so much that he got it wrong. And he did get it spectacularly wrong. It was the cockiness with which Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt got it wrong, as he accused former Special Prosecutor Jack Smith of perjuring himself before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Did the cockiness have anything to do with a conveniently timed Axios piece touting him as a potential 2028 Vice Presidential candidate? Survey says… Number one answer on the board!
The exchange—and Schmitt’s colleague Senator Katie Britt’s “oh sh’t” realization that the jig was up caught in slo-mo—provided the only moment of interest in yet another belabored hearing meant to rehash Republicans’ debunked claim that Smith broke the law during his investigation of Donald Trump, an investigation which resulted in dozens of felony counts against the then-former president.
“You don’t think you know we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a moment to process it,” Schmitt said to Smith, while his staff (very briefly) held up a poster board showing screen grabs of text messages purportedly proving that Jack Smith had just perjured himself after denying that he attended an Atlanta Hawks game in February 2024.
The needle these supposedly incriminating texts were supposed to thread involved, I guess, a secret meeting Schmitt seemed to have invented between Smith and Fulton County DA Fani Willis for the purpose of… who the hell knows?
So as it turns out, the person who needed a moment after the revelation of these supposedly damning texts was Schmitt himself.
Needless to say, it’s hard for a seventh-grade-style posterboard collage to look particularly damning. Especially when it turns out the text messages in question did not–at all–support Schmitt’s allegation.
Smith had attended an entirely different basketball game in an entirely different state that day. There was no secret meeting with Willis. No conspiracy. No perjury. No nothing, except one embarrassed senator subsequently blowing up at another, Amy Klobuchar, for attempting to clear up the confusion which seemed to center on the Atlanta Hawks and the Iowa Hawkeyes, which is the team Smith went to watch that night.
Not to mix sports metaphors, but when it comes to competence among current Republican officials, it was par for the course.
“I think people should have their facts straight before they accuse somebody of being a dirtbag,” Klobuchar said to Schmitt. Schmitt had, indeed, called Smith a dirtbag only moments before.
“I stand by that statement,” said Schmitt.
Later, Schmitt visited the Charlie Kirk Show (yes, it’s still called that despite the fact that Charlie Kirk no longer hosts the show owing to his assassination), where the hosts loved him and his stunt up real good.
“A great moment,” one of the hosts told Schmitt.
For his part, Schmitt seemed to not fully appreciate how much of a laughingstock he’d become in the hours since the hearing. To be fair, though, can we really expect much introspection from somebody prepared to stage such a half-assed stunt to begin with? The dude thought he was Perry Mason. It turns out he was Pee Wee Herman. (With apologies to Pee Wee, RIP.)
Schmitt will, of course, face no consequences for his idiocy other than a day or two of embarrassment and jokes from late-night comics. Just as his fellow Missourian Senator, Josh Hawley, has faced few lasting consequences for his fist pump of support to the January 6 protestors who stormed the Capitol—before scampering away when they breached the building.
These are the sorts of people Missouri Republicans are supporting; the Show Me State is showing the nation their entire ass. Then again, it’s not like the problem is intrinsic to Missouri. Bad candidates occur on both sides of the aisle, and can be found across America, from sea to shining sea. No party has a monopoly on craven or stupid, but the Republicans of late have certainly secured an outsized market share.
So ridiculous are the nation’s Republicans that it was left to the office of the nanogenarian Chuck Grassley to warn Schmitt’s team off using the unvetted texts. When Chuck Grassley is more on top of it than you, buddy, that’s a problem.
The nonsense with Jack Smith isn’t even the dumbest thing that happened that day, when our Burger King signed a document changing “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence,” a document signed in the presence of the nation’s allegedly greatest minds in tech, none of whom apparently noticed “United States” was misspelled. By the way, I’m neither a linguist nor a constitutional scholar, but I’m pretty sure the American president doesn’t have the authority to rename common English terms?
But sure. Why not? If so, can he do something about the use of the word “do” when ordering a meal at a restaurant? For some reason, I always want to vomit a little when somebody says, “Yeah, I’ll do the Caesar salad,” instead of saying, “I’ll have the Caesar salad.” One sounds like you’re eating the meal. The other sounds like you’re molesting it. President Trump, please sir.
So yeah, another stupid day in America. Dumb accusations that, even if they’d been true, have nothing to do with anything. So what if Smith had gone to that basketball game? The hell would that have to do with anything?
The Senate may like to think of itself as a forum for high-minded political oratory, but if the 24-hour news cycle has taught us anything, it’s that however accomplished some of its members may have been before they entered public service, something about having a TV camera in your grill turns too many of them into blathering idiots. Or worse, maybe they’ve been idiots this whole time and we just never noticed.
We’re certainly noticing now.
