In showing himself both boorish and incompetent, Schmitt was trying to make a point . . . that was pointless.
The face-plant by Senator Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.) at today’s Senate Judiciary Committee grilling of Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith was so weird.
Schmitt recklessly accused Smith of lying and called him a “total dirtbag” (which I’m sure the Trump sycophant’s audience of one appreciated). Schmitt acted as if he had a smoking gun against Smith: proof that he had been in Georgia on February 3, 2024, meeting with Fulton County attorney and fellow Democratic Trump prosecutor Fani Willis — apparently at a critical time when Willis’s misconduct was blowing up her case. Smith denies that he met with Willis while he was special counsel.
As his blockbuster evidence, Schmitt displayed text messages supposedly establishing that Smith had attended an Atlanta Hawks basketball game that night. Turned out the senator doesn’t know his Hawks from his Hawkeyes: Smith was at a basketball game all right, but it was a women’s game in College Park, Md., where then-college-hoops sensation Caitlin Clark was in town with her University of Iowa Hawkeyes to play the University of Maryland’s Terrapins.
It’s not enough to say Schmitt can’t even do demagoguery competently. He has been a lawyer for over 25 years and was Missouri’s state attorney general (who, natch, joined legally laughable lawsuits challenging Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election). Presumably, then, he knows that even if he could prove Smith was in Atlanta on the day in question, that would not establish that he met with Willis before or after the basketball game.
But it’s worse than that. It is a commonplace that when federal and state prosecutors are pursuing similar charges against the same defendants — which generally means they need to rely on many of the same witnesses — they are frequently in contact, including in person if convenient, in order to coordinate witness interviews and evidence reviews. The reason is obvious: If a witness is poorly prepared and gives sloppy testimony in one prosecutor’s case, that testimony will be used to undermine the witness in the other prosecutor’s case. It would be malpractice for the prosecutors to fail to coordinate. I have no reason to doubt Smith’s claim that he never met with Willis in person during their investigations, but I’d be very surprised if his staff did not reach out to hers to coordinate — perhaps even try to have investigators from both the federal and state investigations present at the preparation interviews of important witnesses. There is nothing untoward or illegal about it.
As I’ve pointed out, there is no shortage of missteps and politicized decision-making about which to question Smith — although the Republican claims that his two indictments of Trump were fabrications involving no serious misconduct are ridiculous. But if you’re going to swing for the fences as Schmitt did today, shouldn’t it be over something that would be scandalous if proved?