Bobby Burns Was Right about Those “Best-Laid Plans.”

By now, Gentle Reader, you will no doubt be aware of the utter implosion of Senator Eric Schmitt’s ill-considered attack on former Special Counsel Jack Smith.  There are some points Curmie wants to make here.  Most if not all have been made by someone else, but Curmie hasn’t seen them all in the same place before.

We start with a supposition on Curmie’s part: that the whole point of this Senate hearing was to distract attention from the disaster that is a nation run by a sociopathic idiot in the White House, a swarm of sycophantic legislators more interested in pleasing the President than in doing their jobs for the citizenry, and a Supreme Court that only occasionally and half-heartedly deigns to curtail the outrages committed by the Executive branch.  Curmie might be wrong about the motivations, but he sees no evidence to suggest that he revise, let alone abandon, that impression. 

It is widely speculated that the reason Smith was called to testify was that everyone in what passes for a brain trust in the GOP assumed that he’d plead the Fifth Amendment to virtually all questions, allowing them to dance around, proclaiming that his findings were partisan, and bellow that he was seeking to avoid responsibility by dodging questions.  They were, as usual, wrong.  Instead, he showed up, thanked the committee for the opportunity to discuss his work, answered every question, and pretty much mopped the floor with the Republican interrogators.  Schmitt was the foremost loser, of course, although it’s the horror on the face of Sen. Katie Britt as the scheme goes up in smoke that’s going to be a meme for a very long time.

OK… how’d we get here?  Schmitt obviously wanted to catch Smith in a lie and then take a victory lap, hoping, according to some pundits, to improve his chances to be the VP nominee in 2028.  Or, hypothetically, to get Smith to admit that he was in Atlanta, watching the Hawks play the Warriors on February 3, 2024.  It’s a strange strategy, though, as he tried to prove that Smith was in Atlanta specifically on the day after Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis admitted to her affair with lead prosecutor Nathan Wade. 

We know that Smith was in fact elsewhere—we’ll get to that in a moment—but let’s suppose that Schmitt was correct, that Smith was indeed in Atlanta.  The question “So fucking what?” seems pertinent.  Seriously, is being in the same rather large city as someone behaving unethically a reason to suspect him of collusion?  Curmie can state with absolute certainty that he has been in the same city at the same time that a major crime was planned and/or committed.  So have you, Gentle Reader, if I might be so bold.  So, in all likelihood, has Curmie’s friend’s newborn.  That doesn’t mean we’re guilty of anything.  Moreover, if there really was collusion, one suspects that Smith would have been smart enough to use a burner phone and handle everything that way.

Let’s face it, Eric Schmitt would come in third in a battle of wits with a broken stapler and a rotting tree trunk.  The staffers who provided the ammunition for his carefully-planned “gotcha” moment aren’t much better, but on a good day they could probably hold their own against the stapler.

Anyway, Schmitt acts all smarmy and thinks it’s time to spring the trap: “What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were it Atlanta at a Warriors/Hawks game on February 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair?”  Note that he has to read the whole sequence.  One wonders who actually wrote those questions.

Smith looks befuddled, and Schmitt moves in for the kill.  “If don’t think you know we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it, so you don’t, you know, perjure yourself.”  This flourish is accompanied by the unveiling of that remarkably stupid poster (seen above) that is held up briefly, then quickly disappears.  Smith asks to see it again, and Schmitt declares that Smith has already perjured himself, and gets testy when other Senators ask to see the poster.

You will note, Gentle Reader, that there is nothing on that poster that mentions either Atlanta or a basketball game.  All that’s clear from what we can see is that Smith has a reserved seat for some event in some venue somewhere.  It could be a concert in Cheyenne, for all we know.  Exactly how that was supposed to scare Smith even if he were guilty is unclear.  We suspect there may have been more damning “evidence” in Schmitt’s files or something, but the logical thing to do if you want to defame a witness on national television is to present the best stuff you’ve got.  You might also try not call him a “dirtbag” if you don’t know (as opposed to smugly presume) you’re on firm ground.  Ah, but Schmitt is an idiot, remember…

Smith continues to deny attending a Hawks game, presumably ever, then has a thought: he had been to a women’s basketball game between Iowa and Maryland at about that time, early February of 2024.  Curmie presumes that Smith was working out of Washington, DC at the time; it’s only a little over a half-hour drive to get to the Terps’ home court.  Smith said he wanted to see Caitlin Clark play.  That’s reasonable: she was already something of a phenomenon, far and away the most famous female collegiate player ever, and well within sight of the all-time scoring record she would ultimately break a few weeks later.

Then Senator Amy Klobuchar enters the conversation.  She checks with a staffer, confirms that the Iowa team is called the Hawkeyes (sometimes shortened to “Hawks”), and suggests a possible source of confusion.  That’s when all the air goes out of Schmitt’s balloon.  Klobuchar then checks: yes, that game was indeed on February 3.  And that, as they say, was that.  Video confirming that Smith was indeed at the Hawkeyes game was simply the icing on the cake.

Interestingly, however, despite the multitude of headlines and the plethora of memes about the Atlanta Hawkeyes, etc., the conflation of Hawks and Hawkeyes wasn’t, apparently, where Schmitt and his minions screwed up.  It was something a little more telling in political terms.  Whatever information Schmitt had seems to have identified the event Smith attended as a basketball game.  It obviously didn’t say anything about Atlanta; that was a surmise on Schmitt’s part. 

A report by CNN’s Lauren Fox says that Schmitt was trying to find out where Smith was, so they 

... referenced and cross-referenced what the schedule for games around the country was that night for both men’s basketball in the NBA, as well as men’s basketball in college, and they only found one game, which was this game in Atlanta…. 

But what had not been considered was whether there was a women’s college basketball game at the University of Maryland against the Iowa Hawkeyes.

The fact that Smith was watching the Hawkeyes rather than the Hawks is nothing more than a coincidence, in other words.

The “cross-checking” Fox mentions presumably included the time of the opening tip, 7:30.  There would be dozens of games played on a Saturday in February, but whereas Curmie doubts that there was only one 7:30 local start time, it’s possible. What matters is that Sen. Klobuchar’s guess of a linguistic confusion was incorrect.  (She also reported that Clark scored 30 in that game; it was actually 38, with 14 assists.)  Her main point still holds, however: Schmitt and his staff didn’t do their homework before hurling around accusations. 

The problem wasn’t the coincidence of “Hawks” and “Hawkeyes” playing at the same time.  It was, rather, the casual sexism of being unable to understand that a grown man might want to watch a women’s game, even one that a). featured a player about to break the record for points in a collegiate career, and b). was within easy driving distance. 

Eric Schmitt is stupid, reckless, and more interested in grandstanding than in anything in the same universe as the truth.  He is a Republican politician, in other words.  If he wants to see what a dirtbag looks like, he need only look in the mirror.