# Eric Schmitt Republican U.S. Senator from Missouri since January 2023. As the state's former attorney general he was among the most active Republican AGs litigating against the Biden administration, and in the Senate he has been a reliable ally of the MAGA wing on immigration, spending, and judicial fights. ## The Jack Smith hearing — September 29, 2026 Schmitt's questioning of former special counsel [[Jack Smith]] before the [[Senate Judiciary Committee]] on **September 29, 2026** is the clearest single illustration in the vault of a fabricated predicate delivered under the protection of the [[Speech or Debate Clause]]. The setup was a conspiracy theory: that Smith had met secretly with Fulton County district attorney [[Fani Willis]] and her appointee [[Nathan Wade]], coordinating the federal and Georgia prosecutions of [[Donald Trump]]. Schmitt's evidence was that Smith had attended a Golden State Warriors–Atlanta Hawks game on **February 3, 2024**, the day after the Willis–Wade relationship became public. **The predicate was false in every particular.** | Schmitt's claim | What the record shows | |---|---| | Smith attended an Atlanta Hawks NBA game, February 3, 2024 | Smith attended a University of Maryland women's basketball game against the University of **Iowa** — the **Hawkeyes** — in College Park that day | | Text messages place Smith in Atlanta | The texts on the poster board never mention Atlanta. They read "Is 109 Row 1 reserved for Jack?" | | The seat reference points to State Farm Arena | State Farm Arena letters its rows in section 109; Maryland's arena numbers them | | Smith met Willis and Wade | Smith testified he had never met either; no evidence to the contrary was produced | Schmitt nonetheless told Smith, "I don't think you know that we have this stuff, so I'll give you a second to process it so you don't, you know, perjure yourself," followed by "I think you've already perjured yourself." He called Smith a "villain" and a "total dirtbag." [[Amy Klobuchar]] worked out the confusion in real time and told him: **"You had the teams wrong, sir."** Schmitt responded by accusing her of "trying to rehabilitate the witness," and defended the Atlanta premise on the ground that "it was the only NBA game going on at that time in Atlanta." Newscasters who reviewed tape of the Maryland game located Smith in the stands. ### Why it belongs in the KB The episode did not end with the correction — it ended with the payoff. Schmitt appeared on [[The Charlie Kirk Show]] the same day, where host Andrew Kolvet told him, "Jack Smith is a total dirtbag and you caught him out on this NBA game…in Atlanta. It was a great moment." The fabricated version, not the corrected one, is what reached the audience. That is the mechanism the vault tracks as [[Firehose of Falsehood]]: the accusation travels on its own, and the retraction does not follow it. The asymmetry is structural, not incidental. A witness who lies to Congress is exposed to prosecution; a senator who asserts a falsehood in a hearing is shielded by the [[Speech or Debate Clause]] and characterises it afterward as having merely asked a question. Schmitt's own formulation on the day was "my job is to ask the questions." > [!warning] Sourcing > The exchange is reconstructed from [[Talking Points Memo]] (Hunter Walker, who established the section-109 row-lettering point), *Rolling Stone*, the *Washington Examiner*, the *Missouri Independent* and Fox 5 New York — five independent outlets carrying the same quotes and sequence. Smith's own words come from his written statement to the committee. No quotation here rests on HCR's letter of September 29, 2026, which is what surfaced the episode for this vault. ## See Also - [[Jack Smith]] — the witness, and the fuller account of his testimony - [[Speech or Debate Clause]] — the immunity that made the accusation costless - [[Amy Klobuchar]] — who identified the error during the hearing - [[Senate Judiciary Committee]] — the venue - [[Fani Willis]] · [[Nathan Wade]] — the two figures at the centre of the alleged meeting - [[The Charlie Kirk Show]] — where the fabricated version was amplified after the correction - [[Firehose of Falsehood]] — the propagation pattern this fits