The document dump Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) used to accuse former special counsel Jack Smith of lying under oath is not what it was cracked up to be.
The text messages Schmitt cited during this week's congressional hearing never referenced any basketball team names, according to reporting from The Hill and the Washington Examiner. That undercuts the Missouri senator's claim that Smith perjured himself when he denied attending an NBA game in Atlanta, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis was simultaneously pressing her election case against President Donald Trump.
The showdown played out live on national television. Schmitt asked Smith whether he had attended a Feb. 3, 2024 NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks. Smith looked confused and asked what city that would be in. Told Atlanta, Smith said no — he was not there. Schmitt then laid out the innuendo the question was built to carry: the day before, Willis had acknowledged her romantic relationship with special prosecutor Nathan Wade, who was helping lead Georgia's racketeering case against Trump. An NBA game in Atlanta, in Schmitt's framing, would have tied Smith to Willis' prosecution.
Smith offered a different account. He said he had attended a women's college basketball game in Maryland in that timeframe — Iowa's Hawkeyes playing the University of Maryland. Iowa is Smith's home state.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) jumped in to defend Smith, telling the hearing that people should have their facts straight before accusing someone of being a dirtbag — and not get the teams wrong.
What makes the exchange harder to brush off is what happened before the cameras turned on. According to reporting from MS NOW, committee staff explicitly warned Schmitt's team that the text messages they were given were unvetted and that verifying the information was Schmitt's responsibility. He ran with them anyway.
The Georgia case at the center of Schmitt's questioning has since collapsed. The Georgia Court of Appeals removed Willis from the prosecution in December 2024 over the appearance of impropriety created by her relationship with Wade. A subsequent prosecutor declined to pursue the case. For conservatives who spent years arguing the Trump prosecutions were coordinated political warfare, the underlying grievance is not in dispute — the cases are gone, and the people who brought them have scattered.
But a hearing is not a rally, and an accusation of perjury is not a talking point. Schmitt is a sitting United States senator and a former Missouri attorney general. When a senator tells a witness under oath that he is a liar, and the evidence behind the charge turns out to name no team, no game and no city, the witness gets the last word. That is what happened here.
The hearing was held with the midterm elections barely a month away. Salon reported that Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei had published a piece the morning of the hearing placing Schmitt at the top of a speculative short list to be Vice President JD Vance's running mate in 2028, quoting admirers who called Schmitt trustworthy and articulate. The rollout did not survive the afternoon.
Whether Schmitt's office reviewed the texts before brandishing them in front of a Senate committee has not been answered publicly. His office has not said who prepared the material. The texts themselves, as described in the reporting, do not contain the basketball reference Schmitt attributed to them.
Our Take
Nobody at Next News Network is going to shed a tear for Jack Smith. This is the man who threw the full weight of the federal government at a former president and current commander-in-chief, and the American people rendered their verdict on that project in November 2024. The prosecutions were political. That was always the point. But here is the problem, folks: you do not beat a political prosecution by handing the other side a gift on live television.
Schmitt walked into that hearing holding a headline — Smith, Willis, the same city, the same weekend — and walked out as the answer to a trivia question about which basketball teams were playing. The left didn't have to write the punchline. He handed it to them. And with the midterms a month out, every Democrat operative in the country now has a loop of a Republican senator getting the teams wrong while accusing a federal official of perjury.
The staff warned him. That is the part that should burn. The material was unvetted, and verifying it was his team's job. Somebody skipped that step — maybe because the story was too good to check. If Schmitt wants to be taken seriously as a national figure, and reportedly as a future running mate to JD Vance, he cannot operate like a blogger chasing a viral moment. The Senate is not a podcast. When you accuse a man of a crime under oath, you bring receipts, not vibes.
What Schmitt should be doing is asking why committee staff handed a senator unvetted material in the first place and then let him walk it into a hearing. That question answers itself, and it is a better line of inquiry than a basketball game.
We the People want the Deep State exposed, not embarrassing. The truth about the Trump prosecutions is damning enough without embellishment. Every time a Republican oversells the evidence, the media gets a free day and the real corruption slides one more inch out of the frame.
So here is the question for Sen. Schmitt: who told you those texts said what you said they said — and are you going to name them?
