Eric Schmitt had reached the part of his interrogation where he warned Jack Smith about committing perjury. He had not yet established which basketball game Smith had attended, but apparently that could wait.
At Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Schmitt suggested that Smith had attended an Atlanta Hawks game in February 2024, placing him in the city where Fani Willis was pursuing her own case against Donald Trump. He produced a poster containing text messages and told Smith, “I think you’ve already perjured yourself.”
Smith remembered attending a women’s basketball game in Maryland, where Caitlin Clark was playing for the Iowa Hawkeyes. The game was in College Park, not Atlanta. This presented a difficulty for the senator’s theory of what Smith had been doing in Atlanta.
The following day, asked whether he regretted calling Smith a liar, Schmitt answered: “He has lied before to Congress.” His explanation for the basketball mistake concluded, “I didn’t know he was a Caitlin Clark fan. Now we know.”
Schmitt offered another accusation as a reason he need not regret making the first. And attending a game in Atlanta would not have established that Smith met Willis, much less that they conspired to abuse their offices.
But Smith and Willis were both trying to get Trump, you see. What else would they be doing?
I think there is a confession in that expectation. If you regard a public office as an opportunity to reward your friends and punish the people you hate, why would someone with the means to get a desired result allow an ethical obligation to interfere? You would know what to do with the opportunity, and you assume they do too.
In that account, Smith cannot simply have done his job. His insistence that he did becomes part of the concealment, and the absence of evidence becomes a reason to look for something he has hidden.
Perhaps Schmitt merely knows his audience will believe it. Either way, he was willing to threaten a man with prosecution before checking whether the denial he called perjury was true.
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Trump accused Hillary Clinton of giving away American uranium rights in exchange for donations to the Clinton Foundation. In the Uranium One affair, too, he failed to establish that anyone had bought a government decision.
Investors connected to Uranium One had donated to the foundation, and the foundation acknowledged mistakes in its disclosures. Those donors’ interests in government decisions were a perfectly good reason to scrutinize the arrangement.
But the 2010 transaction, through which Russia’s Rosatom acquired a controlling interest in the company, went through a nine-member interagency review as well as separate regulatory approvals. The State Department’s representative, Jose Fernandez, said Clinton “never intervened with me on any C.F.I.U.S. matter.” Neither the donations nor the failure to disclose them established that Clinton had sold a decision.
Disliking the Clintons did not relieve anyone alleging bribery of the obligation to establish the bribe. But try explaining that to someone who thinks your refusal to assume guilt reveals something suspicious about you.
Once you have accepted that everyone exercises power this way, you can excuse almost anything your own side does. Refusing to do it begins to look like a willingness to lose.
Some of the people I worked with in Bitcoin were convinced that liberals secretly wanted permanent lockdowns. I spoke to one of them at length over drinks. He believed they wanted total control over people’s lives, and he was very convinced that he understood them. And yes, that was very deranged.
You could believe restrictions had outlasted their justification without believing liberals wanted them to last forever. He was attributing to them a desire to keep everyone confined even after the public-health justification disappeared.
Concern about disease would be what they said to conceal that ambition. Even lifting a restriction could be understood as something they had been forced to concede, rather than a reason to reconsider what you believed they wanted.
He was as confident about other people’s secret desires as he might have been about something they had actually told him. How do you discuss a policy with someone who believes its stated purpose is a lie you are either helping tell or too foolish to recognize?
I personally think this level of social paranoia should be pathologized. But that’s just me.
Unfortunately, these people can now start podcasts and call it “alternative media.” The bullshit you heard over drinks can become the explanation the establishment refuses to give you, and asking for evidence can get you dismissed as someone who still trusts the establishment.
After the hearing, Andrew Kolvet praised Schmitt on The Charlie Kirk Show: “Good for you on that,” and “Gotta give you some flowers for that, sir.” Kolvet described Smith as acting “dumbfounded and completely clueless.”
Smith had been confronted with a story about something he had not done. His confusion could now be offered as further grounds for ridicule, while the person responsible for the false accusation received congratulations.
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On September 20, 2025, Donald Trump publicly pressed Pam Bondi over the absence of charges against his adversaries, including James Comey and Letitia James. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” he wrote, before invoking his own treatment: “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING.”
According to the same reporting, Erik Siebert, the prosecutor whose office was investigating Comey and James, had told officials he did not believe the evidence was strong enough to bring charges. Trump announced that he was replacing him with his own former attorney, Lindsey Halligan, whom he wanted “to get things moving.”
You do not have to reconstruct a basketball itinerary to establish that the president was pressuring his attorney general. His grievance could establish nothing about his opponents’ guilt, but he wanted action.
If Smith was secretly doing the same thing, you can tell yourself Trump is retaliating. You do not even have to establish the accusation against Smith before putting it to work in Trump’s defense.
If you believe political interference with prosecution is wrong, a president making this demand should trouble you. Telling me Democrats started it does not explain why I should accept it. Even proof of an earlier abuse would give you a reason to stop it, not an entitlement to arrange another.
And these were people who felt safer with Trump in charge. They could see a desire for total control concealed inside a public-health argument, but somehow felt reassured by putting him in power. I think that was a fucking moronic judgment.
Then people who believe this bullshit turn around and diagnose people like me with a “derangement syndrome.” I was worried about a man using presidential power against his enemies. Now he is publicly pressing his attorney general to pursue those enemies, and somehow the conversation is still supposed to be about what is wrong with me.
On that question, I got it right. They got it wrong. And yet they still feel qualified to explain what’s wrong with my judgment.
What would have to happen before they reconsidered? The conduct I warned about can occur without disturbing their belief that I was deranged to warn about it. They can keep their account of me and never have to revise their account of themselves.
I think that is insane. And I am tired of being asked to treat people reasoning this way as the sober participants in a conversation they have made almost impossible to have.
Asked afterward whether he still thought Smith had committed perjury, Schmitt told NBC: “We’ll find out. That’s going to be up to a prosecutor to determine.” Smith had denied being at a game he had not attended, and the senator who accused him still refused to close the question of whether that denial was a crime.
Go Deeper into the Circus
Lost Friendships and The Cost of Understanding
You were terrified that Donald Trump would win in November 2024. And before the result, you understood enough about him that you wanted him kept far from power. You did not need someone to explain why.
The Press Was Too Charitable
Listening to The Dispatch Podcast this morning, I heard Kevin Williamson explain how failing to appear at a court hearing can get you thrown in jail in America. The discussion concerned a former patient of Roger Marshall, now a Republican senator, who says she was
You are a Philosopher. Words to you are like atoms. You start at the very smallest of structures and you build your ideas precisely. You cannot discuss your ideas made from atoms with others who build ideas from pre-made paragraphs. Eventually, your brain will explode.
When I was in Construction a fellow worker once said to me regarding those who argued without any rules,
"If you wrestle with pigs, both of you will be covered in mud. But... the pigs like it.
They are lying and they know it. They have been trained at it since being young by their parents and religious leaders. One lie supports the others and it continues until it is a spider web. Yes it is deranged.