First, the Iowa Hawkeyes delivered a demoralizing 20-19 gut punch to the Michigan Wolverines on a last second play. And now the university has indirectly exposed the sitting senator and former state AG of neighboring Missouri as an unserious clown of the highest order.
Eric Schmitt is a dolt. This isn’t really news. He was a drooling idiot as Missouri’s attorney general where he proved incapable of contending with the plain text of a statute and succeeded mostly in wasting taxpayer resources pursuing a facially frivolous challenge to void Joe Biden’s electoral votes. He’s since taken his talents to Capitol Hill where he’s been a dangerous, irresponsible malignancy as a senator.
Today, he put his crackerjack lawyering skills to the cause of nailing Jack Smith, accusing the former special prosecutor of conspiring — somehow — with Fulton County DA Fani Willis based on smoking gun texts placing Smith in Atlanta.
Except, you know, none of that is true.
After Smith testified that he did not meet with Willis and doesn’t recall being in Atlanta, Schmitt sprung a perjury trap that Wile E. Coyote would’ve sniffed out as an obvious loser.
“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 February 3rd, 2024?”
A staffer hoisted a poster board before immediately taking it down. Schmitt offered to give Smith “a second to process it so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.” Smith asked if he could actually look at the board and Schmitt announced that Smith had already perjured himself. He wrapped up by calling Smith “a total dirtbag.”
Except Smith was NOT in Atlanta. He was, however, in Maryland watching the Iowa Hawkeyes (occasionally referred to as “Hawks”) defeat the Terps on the back of a 38-point effort from then-Hawkeye Caitlin Clark.
Missouri borders Iowa.
This is dumb, yes. But that’s par for the course with Republican officials. But what’s really damning is that a former state AG represented that he had texts that said, “in Atlanta at a Warrior-Hawks game” which they absolutely did not. At best they say “Hawks” and at no point in the process did a supposed lawyer perform even cursory research before accusing a much more respected lawyer of perjury. Work this shoddy is shocking even for a conservative lawyer, which says a lot because the bar for bare competence among red state AGs is already low.
Indeed, it was a Republican AG who once infamously misspelled “Louisiana” in a brief to the Supreme Court on behalf of Louisiana. Oh wait, that was ERIC SCHMITT.
What even is this? You are — ostensibly — a professional. For all the times that conservatives invoke the Framers, I’d just once like to hear how they think the authors of the Constitution would feel knowing that the congressional record is filled with comic sans visual aids.
At the end of the day, it was Senator Amy Klobuchar who got the board back in front of the witness, who then remembered the college hoops contest at Maryland.
But Klobuchar had an unfair advantage since, you know, her state also borders Iowa.
From Raw Story:
“That might be the confusion over the names of the team, but perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully,” Klobuchar told Schmitt.
Schmitt aggressively fired back.
“Whose questioning is this by the way, are you using your time, senator? Is this what this is, are we just having like an open session here? I’m glad you’re trying to rehabilitate the witness, but it’s not your time,” Schmitt said, raising his voice.
“You had the teams wrong, sir!” Klobuchar would eventually explain. It’s cliche at this point, but the fact that liberals managed to get custody of “sports” in the national divorce is an all-timer of a plot twist.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.