Sen. Eric Schmitt tried to use a basketball game to suggest Jack Smith had secretly been in Atlanta. The problem: Smith was at an Iowa Hawkeyes game in Maryland, not an Atlanta Hawks game in Georgia.
Sen. Eric Schmitt came to Jack Smith’s Senate hearing with what appeared to be a very specific gotcha. Smith had said he was not in Atlanta on February 3, 2024. Schmitt said records showed Smith attended a basketball game that day, and the senator repeatedly invoked the Atlanta Hawks. There was just one problem: the game in question involved the Iowa Hawkeyes.
Smith told the committee he had attended a University of Iowa women’s basketball game at the University of Maryland. Caitlin Clark was playing. The game was in College Park, Maryland, not Atlanta, Georgia. Sen. Amy Klobuchar eventually stepped in to clarify the geography and the mascots, explaining that the Hawkeyes and the Hawks are, in fact, two different basketball teams.
The mix-up mattered because Schmitt was trying to build a much larger point. Republicans at the hearing were questioning Smith about his Trump investigations and suggesting coordination with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose office separately prosecuted Trump over efforts to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election result. Schmitt was probing whether Smith had secretly traveled to Atlanta and then lied about it.
Instead, the evidence Schmitt cited turned into a sports-trivia disaster in real time. Smith repeatedly said he had not attended an Atlanta Hawks game and had not traveled to Atlanta in his role as special counsel. Once the actual game was identified, the attempted perjury implication lost most of its oxygen.
The Associated Press described the exchange as one of the hearing’s more awkward moments. Conservative commentator Brit Hume also criticized Schmitt afterward, arguing that the senator had essentially brought the embarrassment on himself by not verifying the detail before using it to accuse someone of dishonesty.
That criticism is not about whether Schmitt is entitled to aggressively question Smith. Senators are supposed to scrutinize witnesses, especially in a hearing involving politically explosive investigations. The problem is that accusations of perjury work better when the underlying basketball team exists in the same city you are talking about.
Smith used the broader hearing to defend his investigations into Trump’s handling of classified documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Republicans attacked his tactics, including the collection of phone records connected to lawmakers during the January 6 investigation. Democrats defended the legitimacy of the probes and accused Republicans of trying to discredit the prosecutor rather than address the underlying evidence.
The Hawks-Hawkeyes episode did not decide any of those substantive arguments. It did, however, offer a compact lesson in what happens when a hearing designed for a viral confrontation produces a viral clip for the opposite reason. Schmitt went hunting for Atlanta and accidentally found Iowa in Maryland.
The internet predictably took over from there. Basketball fans, political reporters and partisan accounts all circulated the exchange, often with maps, team logos and reminders that Caitlin Clark did not secretly play for the Atlanta Hawks in 2024. Somewhere, a Senate staffer probably learned that sports-reference websites are free.
The incident also shows why committee hearings have become unusually high-risk for lawmakers. A sharp five-minute exchange can build a politician’s profile, but a factual error can travel just as fast and survive much longer than the surrounding discussion. Once the clip exists, the rest of the hearing is competing with it for attention.
Schmitt may continue to argue that Smith’s conduct deserves scrutiny. But on this particular point, the factual record is much less mysterious than the senator suggested: Smith attended an Iowa women’s basketball game in Maryland. The Hawks were not involved.
So the question is not really whether senators should press hostile witnesses hard. It is whether someone should check the box score before accusing the witness of perjury on national television.
