The Basketball Confusion at the Center of the Hearing
During the hours-long session on Tuesday, Schmitt pressed Smith over his travel schedule and past public appearances, demanding to know whether the former prosecutor had attended an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on Feb. 3, 2024. Smith denied the travel and stated he had never attended a Hawks game.
As Schmitt’s staff held up a poster board featuring text messages intended to prove Smith had been at an event in question, committee members stepped in to clarify the record. According to NBC News, Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota checked the date of a high-profile matchup and noted that the event in question was actually an Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball game in Maryland, where star player Caitlin Clark scored over 30 points.
Faced with the revelation that he had apparently confused the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes, Schmitt did not back down or apologize during the exchange. Asked by reporters after the hearing whether he still believed Smith had perjured himself, Schmitt maintained that gathering answers was his responsibility as a lawmaker, though he later posted a lighthearted remark on social media asking who knew Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan.
Broader Partisan Clashes Over Trump Prosecutions
The sports mix-up unfolded against the backdrop of a deeply polarized Senate Judiciary Committee hearing where Smith forcefully defended his investigations into President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and the retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Both federal cases were ultimately abandoned following Trump’s 2024 election victory, in adherence to Justice Department policies protecting sitting presidents from criminal indictment.
Republican lawmakers used the forum to assail Smith and his team as partisan operators, accusing him of overreach and demanding his own prosecution. GOP members specifically targeted prosecutors’ secretive acquisition of “toll records” from Republican members of Congress who communicated with Trump around the events of Jan. 6, 2021. Smith defended the subpoenas as standard investigative practice necessary to establish the full scope of the conspiracy, stating that the data provided crucial corroborating evidence that participants sought to exploit the Capitol violence to delay congressional certification.
Meanwhile, Democrats rallied to Smith’s defense, characterizing the Republican-led questioning as a political smokescreen. Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois accused GOP critics of spreading baseless conspiracy theories to whitewash the events of Jan. 6 and deflect from unlawful conduct, while Smith warned that sweeping terminations of his investigative team had deprived the government of vital expertise and undermined the rule of law.