A sitting United States senator accused a former special counsel of perjury this week because he confused the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes. Then he called the man a "villain." Then he did not apologize.
What Actually Happened at That Hearing
Jack Smith was in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday when Missouri Republican Eric Schmitt asked whether Smith had attended an Atlanta Hawks basketball game in February 2024. The implication was clear: that Smith had used the trip to secretly meet with the Fulton County district attorney who was prosecuting Donald Trump on election fraud charges. A clandestine rendezvous. A sinister coordination. A smoking gun.
Smith said, flatly, that he had not attended a Hawks game. He was certain of it. Schmitt's response, according to NPR's Scott Simon, was to announce: "I think you've already perjured yourself." He then called Smith a "villain" and, per Simon, additional names not fit for a Saturday breakfast show.
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota then did the thing that senators apparently have to do now, which is basic fact-checking in real time during a hearing. She established that yes, Smith had been at a basketball game that February night. Just not in Atlanta. He was in College Park, Maryland, watching the University of Maryland host the University of Iowa.
The Iowa Hawkeyes Are Not the Atlanta Hawks
The University of Iowa Hawkeyes. A college team. In the Big Ten. Famous in February 2024 specifically because Caitlin Clark was in the middle of rewriting the NCAA scoring record and drawing the kind of crowds and TV ratings that made that particular game something a lot of people remember in sharp detail.
NPR reports that Iowa won that night, 93 to 85, and Clark scored 38 points. It was not a low-profile evening. It was not an obscure event that would be easy to mistake for something else. It was one of the most-watched women's college basketball games in history. If you were going to fabricate an alibi for a covert meeting, you would probably not choose the game that half the country watched.
Klobuchar told Schmitt, according to NPR, that "perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully" and that "people should have their facts straight before they accuse people." This is Senate-speak for: you embarrassed yourself and also accused an innocent man of a federal crime on national television.
Schmitt's Almost-Apology
The day after the hearing, Schmitt went on KTVI-TV in St. Louis. He did not say he was wrong. He did not say sorry. What he said, per NPR, was: "We had information, of course, about him being at a basketball game. My job is to ask the questions, and his job is to answer the questions."
He then offered what Simon diplomatically called "as close as the senator came to saying he'd made a mistake": the observation that he and Jack Smith are both fans of college sports and college basketball. That's the concession. A shared hobby. The man accused a federal official of perjury in a Senate hearing, turned out to be factually wrong about the basic premise of his accusation, and his follow-up was essentially: we both like March Madness.
For clarity: confusing team names is genuinely easy. Hawks and Hawkeyes both start with Hawk. This is not a mystery. But there's a difference between mixing up two teams at a trivia night and using that mix-up as the foundation for a public accusation of federal perjury against a witness in an official Senate proceeding.
Why It Matters That He Said "Perjury"
Perjury is a federal crime. When a senator declares that a witness has perjured himself in front of the committee, that's not a rhetorical flourish. It is a direct accusation of criminal conduct. It gets into the record. It gets clipped. It gets run on television. It becomes the thing that people remember about that hearing, regardless of what comes later.
That's the game. Say the inflammatory thing in the hearing, loud enough that it travels. Let the correction happen quietly afterward, in a local TV interview, framed not as a retraction but as a mutual appreciation of college athletics. The accusation does the work. The almost-apology does not undo it.
Scott Simon at NPR drew the obvious comparison: was this like Dan Quayle adding an "e" to potato, an innocent gaffe that got away from someone? Or was it something more calculated? Simon doesn't answer the question directly. He doesn't have to.
The Dingo Take
Picture a Democratic senator accusing a Trump-aligned witness of perjury in a Judiciary Committee hearing, getting the foundational fact of the accusation completely wrong, calling the witness a "villain" on the record, and then going on local TV the next day to note that they both enjoy college sports. That Democrat would be the lead story on every right-wing outlet for a week. There would be calls for censure. Tucker Carlson's ghost would haunt three different podcasts about it.
Schmitt gets to frame this as a question-asking exercise. His job, he explained, is to ask the questions. Sure. But when your question contains a factual error so significant that it invalidates the entire premise of the accusation, maybe the job also includes a basic Google search before you accuse someone of a federal crime on camera. The Atlanta Hawks and the Iowa Hawkeyes are not hard to distinguish. One plays in the NBA. One features Caitlin Clark. One was playing in Atlanta that night. One was playing in Maryland.
Jack Smith sat there and told the truth. He said, clearly, that he had not attended a Hawks game, and he was right. He was called a perjurer and a villain for being correct. That's the part that should stick. Not the funny team-name mix-up. The part where telling the truth got a man accused of lying under oath by a senator who hadn't done his homework.
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