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\n

Sen. Eric Schmitt expressed no remorse Wednesday for falsely accusing Jack Smith of lying<\/u><\/a> to Congress about attending a basketball game as a guise to investigate President Donald Trump \u2014 and for creating a viral moment that critics have seized on to undercut the GOP\u2019s case against the former special counsel.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe has lied before to Congress,\u201d Schmitt, a Missouri Republican, said in an interview about whether he regretted calling Smith a liar for denying he was at an event he never attended.<\/p>\n

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday morning, Schmitt was gearing up to deal what he thought would be a crushing blow to Smith, a longtime GOP target for his handling of two criminal prosecutions against Trump during the Biden administration.<\/p>\n

Armed with an elaborate poster displaying text messages where Smith and a colleague discussed seating arrangements for a basketball game, Schmitt was attempting to prove that Smith secretly traveled to Atlanta to watch a home game between the Hawks and the Golden State Warriors as a guise to conspire with Fani Willis \u2014 a disgraced local prosecutor who was also pursuing criminal charges against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election.<\/p>\n

Smith was flummoxed by the accusation, with Schmitt saying he would give the witness \u201ca second to process it so you don\u2019t, you know, perjure yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the attempt backfired when Smith soon realized he had in fact gone to a basketball game the night of Feb. 3, 2024, but not an NBA game in Atlanta, rather a women\u2019s game in College Park between the Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s because Caitlin Clark was coming to Maryland to play,\u201d said Smith of the star women\u2019s basketball player who was then playing for the Iowa team.<\/p>\n

Schmitt said in an interview Wednesday that the mix-up was due to the fact that there were no other NBA games that same night with a 7:30 p.m. starting time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, we had text messages from [Smith\u2019s] team that he was at a basketball game, and the only game at 7:30 tip-off in the NBA was in Atlanta,\u201d Schmitt said, adding, \u201cI didn\u2019t know he was a Caitlin Clark fan. Now we know.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sen. Eric Schmitt expressed no remorse Wednesday for falsely accusing Jack Smith of lying to Congress about attending a basketball game as a guise to investigate President Donald Trump \u2014 and for creating a viral moment that critics have seized on to undercut the GOP\u2019s case against the former special counsel. \u201cHe has lied before […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}