How a sloppy Republican attempt to ensnare a Trump enemy backfired spectacularly

Washington: It’s sometimes said that the Trump administration operates on the motto: “Shoot first, aim later.”

So it was in the US Senate on Tuesday (Washington time) as Republicans tried to incriminate Jack Smith, the Joe Biden-era special prosecutor who twice charged Donald Trump with criminal offences while the now-president was out of office.

Smith was hauled before a Senate hearing on his alleged “abuse of authority and targeting of Republicans”. The GOP senators brought props and everything. What they didn’t bring, however, was adequate preparation.

Eric Schmitt, a Republican senator from Missouri, pursued Smith over whether he attended an NBA basketball game between the Atlanta Hawks and the Golden State Warriors in Atlanta, Georgia, on February 3, 2024.

The timing was significant because the game took place the day after Fani Willis – then the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia – admitted to an intimate relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade.

Willis, a Democrat, had also brought charges against Trump, alleging that he and others entered a criminal conspiracy to fraudulently overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia.

Those charges eventually collapsed, in part because Willis was disqualified from the case after her affair with Wade was exposed.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Schmitt implied that Smith might have colluded with Willis and Wade because he was supposedly in Atlanta at the time their relationship became public.

But Smith denied attending the basketball game. “I definitely did not go to a Hawks game, I’m sure of that,” he said, mystified. He also emphatically denied ever meeting Willis and Wade in his time as special prosecutor.

Schmitt, a twinkle in his eye, said he believed Smith had just perjured himself. His team had gone as far as to prepare a large cardboard poster depicting the text messages that purportedly proved Smith was in Atlanta for the Hawks game that day. Staff members held up the sign during the hearing.

Once Smith was able to read the messages, his memory was apparently jogged. He realised the basketball game he attended around that time was between the University of Iowa Hawkeyes – not the Atlanta Hawks – and took place at the University of Maryland, not in Atlanta.

The game featured Team USA member Caitlin Clark, who is widely considered the best-known and most popular women’s basketball player of this era.

A Democratic senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, pointed out that Schmitt had likely confused the two teams’ names to accuse Smith of being somewhere he wasn’t.

“You are calling a witness a ‘dirtbag’,” Klobuchar told Schmitt. “I think that people should have their facts straight before they accuse someone of being a dirtbag – and not get the teams wrong.”

The mistake was amplified with MeidasTouch, a progressive media outlet, unearthed footage that appeared to show Smith in the bleachers at the Hawkeyes game in Maryland on the night in question.

On the face of it, the attempted “gotcha” had all the hallmarks of a co-ordinated political hit. That morning, US news site Axios carried a short item speculating that Schmitt was looked upon favourably by Vice President JD Vance as a possible 2028 running mate.

Just as Schmitt made his clumsy case against Smith in the Senate, high-profile MAGA media commentators including Sean Hannity and Benny Johnson pumped the content out to their millions of online followers.

In the ordinary run of events, a howler like this – played out in such a public forum – would warrant a sincere apology and retraction. But in the “shoot first, aim later” era of US politics, that’s not what occurred.

Schmitt went on right-wing, pro-Trump channel Real America’s Voice, where he was praised for his so-called gotcha moment – with no recognition that the encounter was based on a factual error.

“You caught him out on this NBA game, by the way, in Atlanta,” the host of The Charlie Kirk Show, Andrew Kolvet, told Schmitt on the air. “It was a great moment, so good for you on that.”

Later, when questioned on the street by entertainment news site TMZ, Schmitt did not relent. “It was not a mistake,” he insisted. “He gave his answer and I guess that’s his answer … we’ll take him at his word that he wasn’t in Atlanta.”

And so what if Smith was in Atlanta that night? The whole spectacle was based on the notion that his very presence in Atlanta – a metropolitan area of 6.5 million people – was somehow a smoking gun suggesting collusion with Willis.

As bows go, they don’t get much longer. But such is the conspiratorial streak running through US politics that this was considered a legitimate line of inquiry – even a potential masterstroke – at a Senate hearing.

As Democratic Party chairman Ken Martin concluded on X: “Eric Schmitt spent all that time rehearsing his big Jack Smith ‘perjury’ gotcha and forgot to check whether the Atlanta Hawks and Iowa Hawkeyes were the same f---ing team.”

For his part, Smith stood by his decisions to bring criminal charges against Trump. He said his investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump “engaged in serious crimes against our nation”.

Smith said if he were asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, he would – regardless of the person’s party.

The clumsy attempt to incriminate Smith was not the only notable instance of sloppiness in Washington on Tuesday. When Trump signed a one-page agreement with the chief executives of major artificial intelligence companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, his signature block read: “President of the Unites [sic] States”.

It was a harmless typo, sure. But it was also another example of how this administration, in its rush to land a punch, rarely stops to check its work.

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