BREAK IT DOWN!
Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony by, and questioned, often pointedly, former special counsel Jack Smith. The resulting exchanges offered a vivid lesson in the danger of building accusations before checking the basic facts.
The hearing concerned Smith’s investigations of President Donald Trump, but one of its most memorable, and frankly, tragicomic exchanges of the day centered on an attempt to link Smith and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Missouri GOP Sen. Eric Schmitt, an attorney and former State Attorney General, suggested that Smith had traveled to Atlanta on February 3, 2024, attended an Atlanta Hawks game, and perhaps used the trip to coordinate with Willis or prosecutor Nathan Wade. The allegation was presented as a potentially devastating contradiction. Instead, it unraveled due to sloppy research and the apparently (for Schmitt and his team) inscrutable difference between the Hawks and the Hawkeyes. After all, they both include the name of a bird, and in this case refer to basketball teams. Never mind that, staying with this case, one team plays college hoops; the other professional, or the fact the locations are more than 650 miles apart.
Schmitt asked Smith whether he had attended a Warriors–Hawks NBA game in Atlanta and warned him about perjury after Smith denied doing so. He displayed internal messages that, in his telling, placed Smith at such a game shortly after Willis disclosed her relationship with Wade. The insinuation was serious: if Smith had secretly met with Willis while federal and state cases involving Trump were proceeding on parallel tracks, it could have raised legitimate questions about coordination and candor. Serious charges, however, demand serious verification—especially when voiced under the authority of a Senate hearing.
Unfortunately, in what had the appearance of an attempted gotcha moment for those assembled, and the MAGA television audience, the available facts pointed somewhere else entirely, completely diffusing the intended rhetorical bombshell. In contemporary parlance, what Schmitt dis is called laying a perjury trap. As it were, Smith recalled attending a women’s college basketball game in College Park, Maryland, to watch Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes play the Maryland Terrapins. Iowa did play at Maryland on February 3, 2024, and Clark scored 38 points in the Hawkeyes’ victory.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar highlighted the obvious explanation: a reference associated with the “Hawkeyes” had been transformed into a claim about the Atlanta “Hawks.” The city was wrong, the league was wrong, and the team was wrong. Most importantly, the supposed evidence had been grossly misinterpreted and did not establish a meeting with Willis. So much for the perjury trap; epic fail.
The effort to connect Smith to Willis was misguided from the outset. It began with a conclusion—covert coordination—and then treated an ambiguous basketball reference as proof. Rather than testing the premise first, in a classic rush to judgment, the questioning escalated immediately to suggestions of dishonesty and wrongdoing.
For any objective observers, this approach did more than embarrass its author. It displaced potentially substantive oversight with spectacle and made it harder to separate legitimate scrutiny from partisan theater. Assuming of course, that was not the point anyway, a committee charged with evaluating prosecutorial conduct should model the evidentiary discipline it expects from prosecutors.
The episode also illustrates how easily a catchy narrative can outrun the record. “Atlanta Hawks” fit a theory involving an Atlanta prosecutor; “Iowa Hawkeyes” did not. Yet resemblance in language is not evidence of resemblance in events. The correction mattered because congressional accusations carry reputational and institutional consequences. Before making the leap to imply perjury or secret collusion, lawmakers should establish where a witness was, what the underlying messages actually said, and whether independent facts support such an inference.
For many observers the hearing will be remembered not because it proved a hidden Smith–Willis alliance, but rather because it showed how quickly confident rhetoric can collapse under elementary factchecking. (Note: This is why Republicans hate factchecking and frequently refer to the media as the enemy of the people.) Smith was not exposed as an attendee at an Atlanta Hawks game; the record instead placed him at a Maryland–Iowa women’s game featuring Caitlin Clark. Conversely, Schmitt was revealed as being a little too eager to gloat over what turned out to be a Pyrrhic victory, at best. The larger lesson is simple: oversight is strongest when it is skeptical, precise, AND fair. When accusation becomes the starting point rather than the conclusion, even a prepared “gotcha” can end up proving only that the questioner got the game wrong.
In case you are keeping score, this was the Senate Judiciary Committee’s first shot at Smith. The House Judiciary Committee held an all-day Closed-Door Deposition of Smith last year, on December 17, 2025, subsequently followed by a public hearing earlier this year, January 22, 2026. As the election nears, the war drags on, gas prices soar, Mike Johnson delays the Pete Hegseth impeachment vote, Republicans overspend to save Texas, the sputtering economy motivates Trump to point to after the midterms for a promised rebound, and Epstein is still on deck, taking another run at Smith feels like destiny; a page out of the proverbial partisan playbook.
The three-steps of said playbook were all on full display in yesterday’s hearing. Deny, deflect, and discredit. The GOP-led Committee first imputed that Trump was faultless. They essentially denied any wrongdoing by him and implied both he, and Republicans writ large were victims of weaponized prosecution. They deflected the attention to Smith and repeatedly endeavored to show him as a purveyor of extra-legal tactics. Finally, as Senator Schmitt did, they made discrediting Smith their work du jour. All in all, it was quite the production. The was solemnity, drama, tension, and thanks to Senator Eric Schmitt, at least one moment of comic relief. “When a “Gotcha” Collapses: Jack Smith, Fani Willis, Eric Schmitt, and the Hawks–Hawkeyes Mix-Up!”
I’m done; holla back!
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The formulation of this post was augmented by the use of AI.
