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Eric Schmitt is sticking to his story.
In an interview with Front Office Sports, the Republican senator from Missouri said he did not mix up the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes during a viral, heated exchange at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday.
Schmitt was trying to establish that Jack Smith, former special counsel to the Department of Justice, was in Atlanta in February 2024, around the time two Georgia prosecutors working on a case against Trump related to alleged election interference revealed they were in a romantic relationship.
The evidence: text messages Smith had sent that night about attending a basketball game. Schmitt repeatedly asked Smith if he was at a Warriors-Hawks game that night, and briefly showed a poster with the text messages. Smith replied that he was at an Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball game at Maryland. (Caitlin Clark was on the team at the time.)
The Missouri senator denied that he had mistaken the two teams.
“There was no confusion between Hawkeyes and Hawk,” Schmitt told FOS on Tuesday night. “It was—hey, you were at a basketball game on Feb 2nd. Was that in Atlanta? cause that was the only NBA game at 7:30 that night.”
His full explanation:
“I asked him a question, if he was in Atlanta, at a Hawks game,” Schmitt said. “It turns out, his testimony was, he was somewhere else at a Hawkeyes game. But we were trying to ask him questions and he had lied to Congress before about reviewing contents of messages and he may have lied today about following the advice of the public integrity unit, about not filing a superseding indictment within 60 days of the election. So we had text messages of him being at a game, you know, on February 3rd, whatever that—or February 2nd, whatever that date was. So I just asked him if he was in Atlanta, because that was actually the only NBA game with a tip-off at 7:30 that night.”
On Tuesday, Schmitt appeared to believe that he was about to catch Smith perjuring himself.
“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 Feb. 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair,” Schmitt said.
“I definitely did not go to a Hawks game. I’m sure of that,” Smith responded before Schmitt’s mixup became clear.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.), retorted: “Could it then be that the University of Iowa is the Hawkeyes. Could that be it?” In the Big Ten matchup that Smith actually attended, Clark exploded for 38 points in a 93–85 Iowa win.
