An embarrassing airball: How Senator Eric Schmitt’s big Senate moment turned viral

The midterm election is right around the corner with just over a month until the first Tuesday in November rolls around.

According to the polls, voters are dissatisfied with President Donald Trump and the rest of the Republicans. The GOP needs to gain ground over the next four weeks to save the election.

Naturally, the Senate Judiciary Committee called Jack Smith to Washington, D.C., to grill him over the prosecution of Donald Trump for his involvement in the January 6 insurrection.

Here, a senator on the committee thought he had his big “gotcha” moment that would result in catching Smith in a lie. Instead, he embarrassed himself.

Senator Eric Schmitt gets his big moment

Senator Eric Schmitt from Missouri used his time in the four-hour-long hearing to try to pin Jack Smith down on an intricate scheme that would show that Smith had perjured himself.

Here, Schmitt focused on an NBA basketball game in Atlanta that Smith had allegedly traveled to watch in order to connect him to a prosecutor from Georgia who had investigated Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

“What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warriors-Hawks game on Feb. 3, 2024?” Schmitt asked Smith while showing a huge placard displaying text messages, which his staffer abruptly pulled down as the trap collapsed.

The senator does not know the difference between sports teams

It was clear that Senator Schmitt at this point thought he had the smoking gun and had caught Smith in a lie after he claimed he did not attend the NBA game. He even called Smith a “dirtbag” after Smith denied going to the game.

There was just one problem: Jack Smith DID go to a game that night, but it was not an NBA game and it was not in Atlanta.

Instead, Jack Smith went to a women’s college basketball game in Maryland to watch Maryland against the Iowa Hawkeyes, who at the time had superstar Caitlin Clark on the team. The only problem was that Schmitt and his staffer had confused the Hawks from Atlanta with the Hawkeyes from Iowa.

Schmitt gets rebutted in real time

The senator’s mistake in confusing the two “Hawks” was quickly pointed out by a fellow member of the committee, Amy Klobuchar.

“I would just say, for a U.S. senator to have false information and imply, based on a confusion about the name of a team — which I knew, knowing my Midwestern sports — and imply that you were in another city, that you were somehow involved that day in what was happening in Georgia, and then call you a dirtbag, is something that deserves an apology,” Klobuchar said to Schmitt after the gaffe was revealed.

Eric Schmitt has not apologized to Jack Smith as of the writing of this article. He has even doubled down on Fox News and The Charlie Kirk Show, claiming that he was just “asking questions.”

The moment goes viral

This tragicomic incident quickly went viral on the internet.

When Schmitt presented the evidence, there was a smirk on his face that quickly faded once people in the room found out what kind of mistake he had made.

Most notable was a zoomed-in reaction of fellow Republican Senator Katie Britt with her mouth agape while Eric Schmitt’s two young staffers sat solemnly in the background.

A larger effort to punish Smith

This all stems from Trump’s desire to find a way to prosecute Jack Smith for his involvement in the two charges brought against Trump for his role in the January 6 insurrection, where his supporters stormed the Capitol.

It has proved increasingly difficult to find a credible reason to indict Smith, which is why Schmitt thought he could concoct this basketball game story to find a connection that would lead to a smoking gun.

As for Schmitt, he had already laid the foundation for the win he thought he would have during the hearing. During the basketball game confusion, multiple conservative influencers had already posted on social media that Schmitt had caught Smith in a red-handed lie.

There were even reports floating around that Schmitt was positioning himself as a potential VP candidate for J.D. Vance if he decides to run for president in 2028.

According to the articles, Vance sees Schmitt as “trustworthy,” “articulate,” and “intelligent.” There is no word on whether J.D. Vance would still apply those adjectives to Eric Schmitt.

This article is made and published by Daniel Wolfram, who may have used AI in the preparation