Sen. Amy Klobuchar has ripped into MAGA Sen. Eric Schmitt over his botched interrogation of Jack Smith, telling her Republican colleague not to make accusations he cannot back up.
Klobuchar took to CNN to rail into Schmitt a second time after calling him out in the middle of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing earlier Tuesday.
In the hearing, a confident Schmitt tried to get Smith to commit perjury with an elaborate line of questioning that centered around him supposedly attending an Atlanta Hawks basketball game in 2024. Smith said he did not attend an NBA game at the time and instead attended a women’s college basketball game between Maryland and Iowa, about 550 miles away.
After Schmitt abruptly wrapped up his line of questioning, Klobuchar tried to clear up the confusion.
“He kept sort of yelling over me,” she recalled on CNN. “This is the last time I heard from him, saying, ‘You can’t use your time to rehabilitate the witness.’ And I kind of figured the only one that needs rehabilitating right now is you.”
Klobuchar, of Minnesota, said she realized what the problem likely was when remembering how Iowans refer to their flagship university’s mascot, the Hawkeyes, as “the Hawks” for short.
“And then, sure enough, Jack Smith said that he‘d been at an Iowa-Maryland game and he went to see Caitlin Clark,” Klobuchar continued. “My lesson from all of it is: Don‘t ask questions when you don‘t know the answer. Don‘t have hearings.”
Schmitt, 51, has tried to gloss over his error, but has not apologized to Smith.
“Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?” he told CNN, laughing. “Listen, we had information was at a basketball game. There was only one NBA game that night at 7:30 tip-off, which was why I asked him if he was in Atlanta. He answered the question. So that’s what these hearings are for. You ask questions, you get answers, you know? Jack Smith has perjured himself before, but he says he’s at the game. Maybe he’s a Caitlin Clark fan. We‘ll accept that.”
In reality, six NBA games were on Feb. 4, 2024—the night in question.
Klobuchar was not satisfied with Schmitt’s explanation.
“I‘m sorry. He accused Jack Smith of perjury in the moment and said don‘t perjure yourself. And then he ended his questions by calling him a ‘dirtbag.’ Those were his exact words. So my point was, don‘t call someone a dirtbag when you don‘t have your own facts right,” she told CNN. “You are trying in your kind of MAGA conspiracy world to come up with this crazy thing that he was in a city that he wasn’t in, that he was at a game, and he had the wrong league and the wrong state and the wrong city, and then use that to completely try to discredit him, which of course didn‘t work in a minute.”
Schmitt should apologize, Klobuchar said.
“You just don‘t make up these things, and when a witness under oath tells you they weren‘t there, you then don‘t continue on down your merry path of claiming someone was at a game and connecting them to some kind of conspiracy that you‘re making up about Atlanta,” she said. “That is the problem about right now with what‘s going on in this Donald Trump world, where instead of questioning why he pardoned 1500 people, many of whom had beat up police officers, you‘re going down this path of conspiracy.”
Klobuchar added that Republicans should have better things to do than “undermine” Smith, which is a distraction from other issues.
Schmitt’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
