As you may know, I’ve been interacting with news and media a bit differently lately while I recover from surgery and rethink how I interact with the internet (specifically social media). Anyway, earlier this week, there was a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where former special counsel Jack Smith testified. This is the type of thing that as a real politics sicko, I would have ordinarily watched live or at least pored over a transcript day of. But I didn’t, because, to be honest, I was probably taking a nap.
In any case, my uncharacteristic detachment from my usual routine gave me the chance to see how “normies” (i.e. people who aren’t politics-obsessed weirdos like I am) may have heard about the hearing, and what they took away from it.
If, like me this week, you heard about this hearing via social media or just a stray article that made its way through your feed, you probably saw one specific highlight: Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) swung for the fences during his questioning of Smith, and... well... it didn’t go how he thought it would.
The short version (which you’ve probably seen) is that Schmitt claimed Smith had been at an Atlanta Hawks game in 2024 and suggested he’d gone to Atlanta to meet with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Both Smith and Willis had been involved in investigating Donald Trump’s alleged crimes and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
“Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3, 2024?” he asked. Smith said no. Schmitt continued: “The day before, Fani Willis came clean with her affair with the prosecutor.” And Smith said that he had never met Willis during his time as special counsel, and he had definitely not been in attendance at that Hawks game.
Schmitt then whipped out a poster board that purported to show evidence that Smith had lied under oath.
“I don’t think you know that we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself,” Schmitt said, dripping with smug confidence. And as you probably know by now, no, Smith wasn’t at that game. He was actually at a University of Maryland women’s basketball game that night. Schmitt seemed to have been confusing the Hawks (NBA team) with the Hawkeyes (NCAA team).
To use a basketball term here, Schmitt air-balled this one big time.
(Somewhat unrelated, but the Warriors-Hawks game Schmitt accused Smith of attending was the one where Steph Curry dropped 60 points, setting a season high. So, hey, I guess if you’re going to put a guy at the wrong basketball game, you might as well pick a good one.)
Now, this flub is notable for a couple of reasons. That morning, Axios’s Jim VandeHei reported that Schmitt “is drawing buzz as a possible Vance VP in 2028.” I find it hard to believe the timing was a coincidence. The story ran on the same day Schmitt would try to grab the headlines with a grandstanding moment in which he’d catch Smith in a lie, committing a crime. This was supposed to help propel Schmitt to political stardom in the GOP, but instead, he came away looking like a clown. Even after being corrected, fact-checked, and called out for all of this, Schmitt continued to insist that he was right, long after he’d been proven wrong. No surprises there.
To add to the egg on his face, there’s the additional irony that he’s the same guy who, back in August, accused Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed of not knowing ball for saying “Beat Ohio” in reference to Ohio State University (for the record, El-Sayed was right; University of Michigan and its fans regularly do say “Beat Ohio” when referring to OSU, sometimes as a bit of a taunt as Ohio State fans and alumni are known to get a bit touchy whenever someone doesn’t refer to it as “THE Ohio State University.” Hell, former Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh even renamed a practice drill after the phrase).
And yes, all of this clearly is a story. It’s absolutely newsworthy that Schmitt botched his big moment on the day that Axios puffed him up. It’s newsworthy that he clearly thought this was such a slam dunk, and that guys like Benny Johnson and Sean Hannity rushed to post about it on social media, despite the fact that they had literally everything wrong. (Both later deleted their posts.) And yes, it’s newsworthy that Schmitt still won’t actually admit that he made a mistake.
But there was a lot more to the hearing that kind of got lost in the Schmitt show. And if you were paying attention to this as someone who doesn’t closely follow politics, you probably missed it. Smith said a lot of stuff that should shake the country to its core, but instead everyone ended up talking about Eric Schmitt.
And it’s not to say that news organizations ignored the other aspects of Smith’s testimony. They didn’t! But the whole thing got overshadowed by Schmitt’s moment. And I guess that the one thought I had as I read more about what happened during the rest of the hearing was that I kind of wish there was a way for news organizations to capitalize on the viral moment to help inform the public about everything else that happened, to use the viral moment specifically as an opportunity.
But to avoid contributing to the Schmittiness of this, I suppose I should also give a quick rundown of what Smith said during the hearing that I think more people should be aware of. So what did Smith actually say?
Smith told the Senate that people are being threatened with prosecution for being seen as opposing the president
In his opening statement, T-minus about 60 minutes before Schmitt grabbed the spotlight, Smith told the committee this:
As with my appearance before the US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary, I am prepared to answer your questions truthfully. I stand by my testimony before the House of Representatives, and I will not be silenced by continued threats of prosecution from the president or others.
As I appear before you today, it is my belief that the rule of law faces challenges unlike any we have experienced in our lifetime. Individuals are threatened with criminal prosecution because they are perceived to have opposed the president. Predetermined outcomes increasingly seem to take precedence over the Justice Department’s longstanding core values and traditions.
History teaches that the rule of law is rarely destroyed all at once. It’s often weakened by attacks on the institutions and the public servants sworn to uphold it. Since January of 2025, we have witnessed precisely such an effort, including the vilification of the agents, prosecutors, and staff who worked on my team, simply because of their unwavering dedication to the rule of law.
I myself have been threatened with jail by the President of the United States. However, I remain confident that the rule of law will endure, because so many continue to uphold it faithfully each day. Throughout our legal system, public servants have remained faithful to their oaths, despite extraordinary pressure to do otherwise. Their example demonstrates that while fear may be contagious, courage is as well.
Back in July, House Judiciary Chairman and alleged knower of a disgusting abuse scandal at THE Ohio State University Jim Jordan referred Smith to the Justice Department, accusing him of knowingly making false statements in his December deposition. At issue are text messages that Smith’s team obtained involving 44 members of Congress, including Jordan. These texts were obtained through the National Archives in response to a request for White House phones. Since we live in bizarro-world, Todd Blanche, Trump’s defense attorney during Smith’s investigation, is now the attorney general. Every day is a new horror, basically.
I digress. Back to the hearing. Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) asked Smith whether whistleblowers who’d talked to Congress about Smith’s investigation should themselves be investigated. Smith said: “I’m not aware of any whistleblowers being investigated. I believe public servants should be protected. The members of my team, that you just mentioned, I’m extremely proud to have worked with them. And the fact that they have been targeted illegally, lost their jobs illegally, and had their lives turned upside down by this Department of Justice is an outrage.”
The hearing’s official title was “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters,” so it’s not exactly shocking that Republicans were on the attack here. So when Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) asked why Smith’s investigators had wanted logs of who called whom, and when, for a group of Republican senators, Smith said that the records “corroborated evidence that we had that the president, President Donald Trump, and his co-conspirators were seeking to exploit the violence on January 6th in furtherance of their criminal scheme.” That’s wild! He was alleging that Trump and his co-conspirators tried to exploit the attack on the Capitol to advance their autocoup, calling Republican senators to get them to delay the certification. When asked to get specific, Smith pointed to a message between Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff and a former member of Congress, and one of the co-conspirators, saying Trump wanted his co-conspirators to call these Republican senators for help advancing the coup. “Co-conspirators, including Rudy Giuliani, then sought to make those calls.”
Then there was Sen. Darline Graham (R-SC), who was recently appointed to fill her brother Lindsey’s seat after he died in July. She pressed Smith about the subpoena for her brother’s phone records and the gag order that came with it. Smith gave an explanation that Lindsey Graham “was not a target of our investigation. And in fact, he likely would’ve been a witness in our case. Your brother investigated the claims that Donald Trump was making. He found them to be false.”
“Then why does the gag order say that disclosure of the subpoena would result in destruction of or tampering with evidence?” she asked.
“Because disclosure of that subpoena could result in Donald Trump attempting to intimidate witnesses as he had before and after,” Smith said. “We had an ample basis for that.”
“The evidence in question belonged to Lindsey and was in the possession of Verizon,” she said. “It makes absolutely no sense that anyone would be able to destroy the evidence you are seeking. Do you know what I think? I think you are just trying to bully my brother and other allies of President Trump. You caused my brother and a lot of other senators a lot of stress, and that makes me sick. You should be ashamed of yourself.”
This sort of... how dare you investigate Donald Trump’s crimes! attitude was a running theme of the hearing when Republican senators were given the floor.
And a lot of what Smith said during the hearing wasn’t particularly new. On Tuesday, he told the committee that his investigation “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation,” much like he did back in December. The difference here was that the December hearing was a closed-door deposition, and this was a public hearing available to anyone with an internet connection or TV.
(I read the transcript so you didn’t have to, and it’s still the most-read piece I’ve ever published here.)
Almost everything that traveled was about a basketball game
Mainstream news stories were mostly fine. Let’s give credit where it’s due. The Associated Press put Smith’s defense of his prosecutions and “a senator’s bungled attempt to accuse him of lying about a basketball game” in the same opening sentence. That’s totally okay. And I don’t have any gripes with how the Washington Post or ABC News covered the hearing, either.
Politico’s story ran under the headline “Republicans wanted Jack Smith to give them a smoking gun. They got a gaffe instead.” By the next morning, though, it was clear that the general public wasn’t anywhere near as interested in Smith’s explosive claims about Trump’s crimes as they were with Schmitt’s faceplant. And I get it. Stories leading with Schmitt’s flub took over the top of Memeorandum and went viral. What’s Resonating, a newsletter that tracks which political clips over-perform, listed seven entries about the exchange, most of them on TikTok, with the most viral of them all getting 4.3 million views. According to right-wing media watchdog NewsBusters, the network evening newscasts barely covered the hearing at all: with ABC News giving it 32 seconds, NBC Nightly News doing “absolutely nothing on the hearing,” and CBS Evening News running “a 10-second commercial ticker.” CBS News’s own TikTok clip of the flub got 2.4 million views. (NewsBusters wanted more coverage not because it was damning for Republicans and Trump, but because they believed that the networks buried the GOP case against Smith, which is just a wild thing to believe. The flub buried that, too.)
To be fair, C-SPAN’s YouTube clip of Smith’s opening statement had more than 900,000 views by Thursday night, about four times as many as its clip of Schmitt there. However, I think that most people who subscribe to C-SPAN’s YouTube channel (*cough* me *cough*) probably aren’t what you’d call “casual consumers of politics news.”
The flub got a lot of interesting cross-over coverage, too. The Athletic, Front Office Sports, TMZ, The Daily Show and Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue all had stories about Schmitt’s gaffe. As far as I can tell, though, only Kimmel touched on anything that went beyond basketball and Schmitt’s embarrassment.
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It’s hard getting people to care about the minutiae of congressional hearings; maybe moments like this are how journalists can change that
Let’s get this out of the way: these are usually very long and extraordinarily boring. Whether in the House or the Senate, they’re often just a series of politicians trying to do exactly what Schmitt did during that hearing. There’s a big I actually have more of a comment than a question vibe to them. Outgoing (thank god) Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) recently used a hearing featuring Dr. Anthea Hartig, Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, to rant about transgender people. This is just the type of thing that happens in these hearings.
Nobody who isn’t paid to watch (or isn’t a sicko like me) is going to sit through all of that, nor should they! But there’s often one or two viral moments that reach people who would never be caught dead actually watching the hearings live. And I think that presents an opportunity for journalists and media organizations to try to use the viral moment as a jumping off point to talk about what else happened and to get people to care about what really matters.
I think this one would have been easy, because Schmitt’s bit helped prove the point that Smith had been trying to make: Trump and his lackeys have been threatening to jail him and others who had investigated Trump for years. Schmitt’s argument was a botched perjury trap. Back in January, Trump accused Smith of “large scale perjury,” and the last senator to question Smith on Tuesday, Josh Hawley (R-MO), told him, “If it were up to me, I’d charge you with perjury, but you should certainly be disbarred.” You could put together a really compelling clip that combines all of this, proving the point.
To his credit, CNN’s Aaron Blake did basically this in his write-up. Yes, he led with Schmitt, but he made an important connection to the larger story: “Republicans have struggled mightily to substantiate Trump’s desire for Smith to be charged criminally. But rarely has it seemed to backfire like it did Tuesday.” The rest of the piece went pretty heavy on what Smith said: that Lindsey Graham was a “likely” witness, his defense of his fired staff, and why he kept the subpoenas secret. Charlie Sykes opened on the flub and then ran a whole section called “What Jack Smith said,” jail line included. Perfect. I’d like to see more stuff like this, and would love to see journalists and influencers come up with additional ideas for harnessing these moments for broader education.