Schmitt Airballs the Perjury Trap Over a Caitlin Clark Game

He walked into the Senate hearing with a smoking gun, and he walked out holding a game program from College Park, Maryland.

"I think you've already perjured yourself."

— Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO), moments before the Senate found out he had the wrong team, the wrong league and the wrong state

Tuesday was supposed to be about Jack Smith. The former special counsel who brought two federal cases against Donald Trump, over the 2020 election and the classified documents, sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee so Republicans could prove his investigations were partisan. For months, the hearing had been built up as the day the prosecutor who hunted Trump finally gets cornered.

The star of the show was a senator with a gotcha.

Eric Schmitt (R-MO), who on Monday had been negotiating a bipartisan college sports bill with Democrats Maria Cantwell and Chris Coons, had saved himself as the headline. He had a poster board. On it: text messages from Smith's team that he claimed proved Smith had secretly traveled to Atlanta in February 2024 to meet Fani Willis, the "scandal-marred" Fulton County prosecutor who also prosecuted Trump, using an Atlanta Hawks game as cover.

Schmitt strode up "strutting and smug," held the board high, and had Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) help him hold it up "with a defiant glare."

"I'll give you a second to process it so you don't, you know, perjure yourself," he said, with a smirk. "I think you've already perjured yourself." He called Smith a "villain" and a "dirtbag."

Then the room remembered which game it was. Smith, baffled, said he had not been to Atlanta. He had never been to an Atlanta Hawks game. And then he remembered the game he actually did go to that month: a University of Maryland women's basketball game in College Park, Md., where he went to watch then-University of Iowa star Caitlin Clark.

Schmitt had confused the Iowa Hawkeyes with the Atlanta Hawks. The New York Times had the cleanest version of the verdict: "It was meant to be a dramatic confrontation, a public accusation of perjury against Jack Smith. Instead, Senator Eric Schmitt's amateur sleuthing into basketball led him to the wrong game, league and state."

One more little detail: the texts on Schmitt's own poster never mentioned Atlanta, Forbes noted. The smoking gun was not pointing at Atlanta. It had never been pointing at Atlanta.

A former prosecutor did the fact-checking live. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) spent eight years as a prosecutor before she became a senator. She saw, in real time and on live television, exactly what had happened.

"I think that people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag and not get the teams wrong," Klobuchar told Schmitt, after first telling him he owed Smith an apology. Schmitt refused.

To Raw Story, Klobuchar went further. "It was so over the top," she said. "The fact that when [Jack Smith] said he wasn't at the original Hawks games, that they just don't believe him shows how far they're taking these conspiracy theories. He's under oath. He's a prosecutor. You have to be very deep into that conspiracy theory to go that far."

The press corps that covers these hearings for a living had no frame for it. ABC's Jonathan Karl: "I have never seen 'evidence' introduced so quickly and then hidden." Chuck Todd: "Confirmation bias virus runs deep with Schmitt." MeidasTouch's Scott MacFarlane, formerly of CBS: "I've never seen anything like this" in 24 years of covering congressional hearings. Politico had the best one: "Eric Schmitt pins down Jack Smith ... as a Caitlin Clark fan."

A perjury charge, live on C-SPAN, from a senator who had not checked what team was playing, what league it was, or what state it was in.

He did not apologize. He asked questions. On The Charlie Kirk Show, Schmitt said, "It was the only NBA game going on at that time in Atlanta. He claimed later that he was at another game." Then came the defense that is supposed to be Washington's last line: "My job is to ask the questions."

Then Wednesday, Raw Story published the part that turns this from a gaffe into a story. A senior Republican senator, who asked not to be named "so they could speak without fear of political retribution," had a theory about where Schmitt's Atlanta proof came from.

"I'm pretty sure the White House asked him to do it," the senator told Raw Story. "And, probably, the White House provided the material."

Even Joni Ernst (R-IA), watching the clip the way people watch car crashes, could not quite contain herself. "Of course I did, of course I did," she whispered, asked if she saw it. "There's something to be said about the staff work, and verifying before we do something like that publicly. I know who the Iowa Hawkeyes are."

Translation: the gotcha was not Schmitt's idea. It was the White House's, and it was bad.

The career math was simple, and it got done by Tuesday afternoon. The morning of the hearing, Axios ran a piece hyping Schmitt as a top contender to be JD Vance's running mate in 2028, a prospect close to the vice president. By the afternoon, with the clip of him holding up the poster board going viral, that story was a ghost.

Conservative commentator Charlie Sykes, who broke with the GOP over Trump, called it an "epic political faceplant" that was "even viler and dumber than it looked." He also pointed at the calendar. "The hearing was also a reminder, weeks before midterms, that every vote for a Republican is a vote to put the gavel in the hands of these guys." With Trump's approval "sinking toward the Nixon Line," a live televised collapse over a women's college basketball game is not a footnote. It is an ad.

Charles P. Pierce, writing in Esquire, finished the job: "The man lacks only a red rubber nose and some floppy shoes."

The interesting part is the man. The Missouri Schmitt and the Washington Schmitt are nearly different people. In the state legislature, he spent eight years doing the kind of work his old party now mocks: pushing autism insurance coverage with Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon, helping legalize CBD oil for his son, who has epilepsy, championing court reform in the Ferguson era, collecting an AFL-CIO endorsement. In a 2014 video tour of the state Senate chamber, he talked about "a more civil tone in politics."

The change came with the Senate. The year before his 2022 campaign, he used "radical left," "tyranny" or "tyrant" on Twitter twice, an analysis found. The next year: more than 100 times. Last year, at a conservative conference, he told the crowd that America "doesn't belong to" the radicals tearing down statues, that it "belongs to us."

Former Sen. John Danforth, who knew the old Schmitt, had a word for it. Senior Republicans who called to reassure him about the 2022 candidacy all used the same one, Danforth told the Kansas City Star: "malleable." One added: "He's been playacting. In other words, he doesn't really believe it."

The White House hands a senator a smoking gun. The senator, the malleable one, holds it up to the light on live television and fires it at the president's prosecutor. Then the country finds out the gun is a game program from a Tuesday in College Park, Md.

The question is no longer whether Schmitt can perjure over a basketball game. It is how many more times the machine will feed him bad material, and how long it takes for somebody in Washington to check the score before calling somebody a dirtbag.