Shitting on Eric Schmitt
Everybody is already shitting on Eric Schmitt.
I recognize this. Senator Eric Schmitt shit the bed so spectacularly during the September 29 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with former special counsel Jack Smith that there is no shortage of people willing to point and laugh. My two cents are not required. The internet has this one covered.
But I am nevertheless going to shit on Eric Schmitt too. Because sometimes piling on serves a purpose.
There is a difference between mocking somebody because they made a stupid mistake and piling on because the behavior that produced the mistake is itself something that needs to be punished socially. Schmitt did not simply forget a name, misread a date, or stumble over a statistic. He constructed an accusation of extraordinary seriousness, delivered it with extraordinary confidence, accompanied it with a personal insult, and apparently failed to perform the elementary checking necessary to determine whether the evidence actually said what he thought it said.
Then the whole thing collapsed because of the Iowa Hawkeyes.
During the hearing, Schmitt questioned Smith about February 3, 2024. He suggested that Smith had secretly been in Atlanta and implied that Smith might have met Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis there. Schmitt said he had text messages referring to Smith being at a “Hawks” game and pressed Smith on whether he had attended an Atlanta Hawks game. Smith said no. He remembered attending a basketball game involving Caitlin Clark. The game Smith had attended was Iowa versus Maryland, in College Park, Maryland. Iowa’s team is the Hawkeyes. Schmitt had apparently transformed “Hawkeyes” into “Hawks,” moved the game hundreds of miles south, and from there constructed the premise for an accusation that Smith had lied under oath.
This was not occurring during a casual television interview. It was a hearing of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. The official subject was oversight of Smith’s conduct as special counsel. Schmitt was questioning a witness under oath about matters touching the integrity of federal investigations and prosecutions.
Schmitt was, to say the least, not exactly approaching the matter with the humility appropriate to uncertain evidence.
He told Smith that he would “go down as a total dirtbag.” The hearing more broadly included extremely aggressive Republican criticism of Smith, but Schmitt managed to distinguish himself by coupling the insult with his supposed smoking gun.
That is what makes this worth piling on.
The problem is not that Eric Schmitt does not know enough about basketball.
I do not give a shit whether Eric Schmitt knows the difference between every bird-themed sports franchise in America. A senator is allowed to be terrible at sports trivia. He is allowed to hear “Hawkeyes” and momentarily think “Hawks.” Human beings make stupid mistakes constantly.
But if your next move after hearing “Hawks” is to construct a theory placing a man in Atlanta, suggest that this places him in proximity to another prosecutor, raise the possibility of secret coordination, and then use that theory while accusing the man of dishonesty before the United States Senate, you had better check which fucking basketball team you are actually talking about first.
That is the standard. And it is not a demanding standard.
What makes the episode worse is that Schmitt subsequently defended his questioning. Reporting after the hearing quoted him saying it was “not a mistake,” even though the central geographical inference he had presented at the hearing had plainly failed: the basketball game Smith described took place in Maryland, not Atlanta.
That is where the story stops being a funny clip about a politician confusing the Atlanta Hawks with the Iowa Hawkeyes.
Because there was an easy way out.
“My evidence did not establish what I thought it established. I got that wrong.”
Done.
Everyone has been wrong. Everyone who works seriously with complicated information eventually makes a mistake that looks embarrassing in retrospect. The ability to recognize the mistake, isolate it, correct it, and update the analysis is one of the basic dividing lines between somebody attempting to discover what is true and somebody attempting to win an argument.
Instead, Schmitt’s performance demonstrated the danger of reasoning backward from accusation to evidence.
Start with the possibility that Smith secretly coordinated with Willis.
Find a text mentioning a basketball game.
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“Hawks.”
Atlanta Hawks.
Atlanta.
Fani Willis is in Atlanta.
Got him.
Except the chain contained a catastrophic failure almost immediately. “Hawks” did not establish Atlanta. And once that link disappeared, everything built downstream from it disappeared too.
This is precisely why serious investigators are supposed to attack their own theories before presenting them as accusations against anybody else. You do not merely ask whether the evidence can be made consistent with your theory. You ask what else could explain the evidence. You verify the links. You actively search for the stupid possibility that makes your beautiful theory fall apart.
Like, say, Caitlin Clark playing for the Iowa Hawkeyes.
There were substantive questions available to Republicans at this hearing. Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley questioned Smith about subpoenas for financial information, congressional phone metadata, the handling of Speech or Debate Clause issues, and other aspects of the special counsel investigation. Smith disputed important elements of the Republican characterization of his work, but those are at least recognizable subjects for oversight: what investigators obtained, why they obtained it, what legal restrictions applied, and whether those restrictions were followed.
Schmitt instead managed to produce a master class in how not to conduct oversight.
Make an accusation first.
Treat inference as fact.
Add personal abuse.
Project absolute confidence.
Discover that the key inference rests on confusing two basketball teams.
Then refuse to concede that you screwed up.
That behavior deserves piling on precisely because the incentives surrounding American politics increasingly discourage admitting error. If every humiliating mistake can immediately be converted into another partisan defense, then there is no corrective mechanism left. Evidence stops disciplining rhetoric. The rhetoric simply consumes whatever evidence happens to be lying around.
That is corrosive regardless of whose investigation is being scrutinized.
You can believe Jack Smith deserves aggressive congressional oversight and still recognize that Eric Schmitt totally shit the bed.
In fact, if you believe Smith deserves aggressive oversight, you should be more irritated with Schmitt, not less. Every minute spent turning “Hawkeyes” into “Atlanta Hawks” is a minute not spent establishing something real. Every spectacularly unsupported accusation makes the next accusation easier to dismiss. Every senator who treats a committee hearing like an opportunity to perform outrage rather than establish facts makes meaningful oversight harder.
Schmitt did not merely embarrass himself. He degraded his own side’s argument. And that is why, despite everybody else already shitting on Eric Schmitt, I am perfectly comfortable joining the pile.
Not because a senator confused two basketball teams.
Because a United States senator appears to have confused confidence with evidence, accusation with proof, and refusing to admit an obvious error with strength.
If we stop humiliating politicians when they behave like that, we should expect them to keep doing it.
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