Sen. Eric Schmitt expressed no remorse Wednesday for falsely accusing Jack Smith of lying to Congress about attending a basketball game as a guise to investigate President Donald Trump — and for creating a viral moment that critics have seized on to undercut the GOP’s case against the former special counsel.
“He has lied before to Congress,” Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, said in an interview about whether he regretted calling Smith a liar for denying he was at an event he never attended.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday morning, Schmitt was gearing up to deal what he thought would be a crushing blow to Smith, a longtime GOP target for his handling of two criminal prosecutions against Trump during the Biden administration.
Armed with an elaborate poster displaying text messages where Smith and a colleague discussed seating arrangements for a basketball game, Schmitt was attempting to prove that Smith secretly traveled to Atlanta to watch a home game between the Hawks and the Golden State Warriors as a guise to conspire with Fani Willis — a disgraced local prosecutor who was also pursuing criminal charges against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election.
Smith was flummoxed by the accusation, with Schmitt saying he would give the witness “a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.”
But the attempt backfired when Smith soon realized he had in fact gone to a basketball game the night of Feb. 3, 2024, but not an NBA game in Atlanta, rather a women’s game in College Park between the Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes.
“It’s because Caitlin Clark was coming to Maryland to play,” said Smith of the star women’s basketball player who was then playing for the Iowa team.
Schmitt said in an interview Wednesday that the mix-up was due to the fact that there were no other NBA games that same night with a 7:30 p.m. starting time.
“Well, we had text messages from [Smith’s] team that he was at a basketball game, and the only game at 7:30 tip-off in the NBA was in Atlanta,” Schmitt said, adding, “I didn’t know he was a Caitlin Clark fan. Now we know.”
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