There are moments in Washington that are so perfectly, painfully on the nose that you have to check the calendar to make sure you’re not watching a political satire. Tuesday was one of those days. Senator Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican with a taste for aggressive questioning, found himself at the center of a self-inflicted fiasco that had senators, reporters, and even the internet collectively wincing. Schmitt spent the afternoon accusing former special counsel Jack Smith of perjury, calling him a “dirtbag” and insisting that Smith had lied under oath about attending an Atlanta Hawks basketball game in February 2024. The supposed proof? Text messages Schmitt claimed to have obtained. But then the miracle of live fact-checking happened. Smith calmly responded that, no, he had actually attended an Iowa Hawkeyes game to see Caitlin Clark, the basketball phenomenon who was busy breaking records and breaking hearts across college hoops. In one of the most embarrassingly simple mix-ups you could imagine, Schmitt had apparently confused the Hawks with the Hawkeyes. Rather than own the blunder, though, Schmitt decided the best move was to make a joke. “Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?” he posted on social media Tuesday evening, as if the entire episode was a harmless gag and not a senator accusing a former prosecutor of committing felony perjury in front of a hearing room full of cameras. It was a stunning refusal to concede that he’d made a huge mistake, and it left evenhis own colleagues visibly shaking their heads.
If you blinked during the hearing, you might have missed the precise moment Schmitt stepped on his own rake. The context matters, because the accusation was never some minor aside. Schmitt was grilling Jack Smith, who had served as special counsel and overseen two federal prosecutions of Donald Trump, about his conduct during those investigations. Schmitt, a Trump ally with a penchant for performing outrage, wanted to paint Smith as a dishonest political operative willing to lie under oath. He cited text messages that, as far as he was concerned, proved Smith had attended a specific NBA game in Atlanta back in February 2024. Smith, according to Schmitt, had denied this while under oath, and therefore Schmitt was ready to declare him a perjurer. It was a grave charge, one that carries serious legal and reputational consequences for any lawyer, let alone one who had already been the target of Trump-world fury for years. But then came the testimony. Smith didn’t just issue a vague denial. He explained that he had, in fact, been at a basketball game around that time—but not the game Schmitt had in mind. He had gone to watch Caitlin Clark play for the Iowa Hawkeyes. In other words, Smith had attended a college basketball game, featuring one of the most famous players in the country, and Schmitt had somehow read dat moment as proof of attendance at an entirely different professional team’s game in an entirely different city. The only common denominator was the word “Hawk.” A senator of the United States, trained inlaw, had built an explosive perjury allegation on what appears to have been a simple, almost comical case of mistaken vocabulary. And rather than walking it back with grace, Schmitt doubled down in the most human way possible: by hoping everyone would just laugh with him.
You could almost feel the embarrassment ripple through the hearing room when Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, gently lowered the hammer. From the dais, she looked at Schmitt and said, with what must have been a mix of incredulity and pity, “You had the teams wrong, sir.”” In six words, she had demolished the foundation of his entire theatrical accusation. It wasn’t just a correction; it wasa public undressing of Schmitt’s investigative skills in real time. The implication was impossible to miss: Jack Smith hadn’t lied under oath; Schmitt simply hadn’t done his homework. The whole “dirtbag” smear, the dramatic invocation of perjury, the careful construction of textual evidence—all of it collapsed because a senator couldn’t tell the difference between the Atlanta Hawks and the Iowa Hawkeyes. The moment was so perfectly absurd that it immediately joined the pantheon of congressional hearing gaffes that will be replayed for years, right up there with politicians asking witnesses to spell simple words or confusing countries with continents. You didn’t need to be a basketball fan to understand the comedy. Hawks. Hawkeyes. One is an NBA team in Georgia. The other is a college team in Iowa. They share a syllable, not a city, not a league, not a schedule. But in Schmitt’s eagerness to land a punch on Smith, he had apparently skipped past basic reading comprehension and gone straight to accusation. Klobuchar, to her credit, knew exactly what she was witnessing and didn’t let it slide. She also knew what should come next. Schmitt, however, was not ready to provide it.
After the hearing adjourned, reporters naturally swarmed Schmitt, eager to see whether he’d finally acknowledge the obvious. It would have been the moment for a little humility, a simple “I misspoke” or “I confused the teams”—the kind of thing that might have let him save a shred of dignity. Schmitt did not choose that path. Instead, he refused to concede anything, offering what can only be described as a rambling, defensive non-explanation. “I don’t know if Jack Smith’s lying or not,” he told HuffPost. “It was the only game ― Atlanta was the only NBA game or men’s college basketball game that night at 7:30.” Read that again and try to parse the logic. He seemed to be arguing that, because Atlanta was supposedly the only game at that time, Smith must have been at that game, and therefore Smith’s claim of attending an Iowa Hawkeyes game was somehow false. But this ignores that Smith never said he was attending an NBA game or a men’s college basketball game at 7:30 on that specific night? He said he’d gone to see Caitlin Clark “around that time.” Schmitt’s own evidence, according to his telling, involved text messages that presumably placed Smith at some basketball event. The event was at Iowa, not Atlanta. Yet Schmitt was now suggesting that the possibility Smith attended an Iowa Hawkeyes gamewas somehow fraudulent, because there was an Atlanta Hawks game scheduled that night. The mental gymnastics were dizzying. He wasn’t just refusing to apologize; he was refusing to acknowledge that “Hawks” and “Hawkeyes” are different things. In Schmitt’s mind, it seemed, any basketball game could be considered an Atlanta Hawks game if you squinted hard enough and were determined enough to believe a special counsel was lying. He had backed himself into a position so indefensible that the only way out would have been a time machine, and he was apparently willing to stand there clutching a map of a world where Iowa is in Georgia.
Klobuchar, meanwhile, did not temper her assessment when she spoke to reporters afterward. She didn’t mince words: “He owes the witness an apology.” It was a simple, stark statement of professional decency. When a senator wrongfully accuses a former public servant of committing perjury based on what turned out to be a schoolboy-level mix-up, the least that senator owe is a genuine, public apology. But Schmitt’s behavior suggested he felt no such obligation. Instead, he attempted to frame his own ineptitude as cleverness, posting that “Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?” as though everyone should now chuckle at the ridiculous idea that Smith, the big bad special counsel, might enjoy watching women’s college basketball. The joke, however, landed with a thud, because it revealed Schmitt’s underlying assumption: that attending an Iowa Hawkeyes game is somehow implausible or disqualifying, or at least a funny enough detail to distract from his own embarrassment. Caitlin Clark, for the uninitiated, was not some obscure curiosity. She was arguably the most celebrated player in college basketball at the time, a generational talent whose games drew record crowds and massive television ratings. The idea that Jack Smith might be a fan of hers was hardly absurd. It was, in fact, entirely human. But Schmitt’s attempt to use the “Clark fan” angle as a punchline only underscored how out of touch he was with what had actually happened. He seemed to believe the scandal was thatSmith had attended a basketball game at all, rather than that Schmitt had accused him based on a false premise.
The fallout from this episode stretches beyond Schmitt’s own embarrassment. It speaks to a broader, more troubling pattern in American political life: theushness with which powerful people throw around terms like “perjury,” “liar,” and”dirtbag” without doing the basic work of verifying their own claims. Schmitt was not engaging in good-faith oversight; he was performing feverish indignation for the cameras, and when the evidence contradicted him, he attempted to laugh his way out of accountability. This is how misinformation spreads, not always through malicious lies, but often through carelessness dressed up as confidence. A senator sees text messages, assumes a narrative, fails to check whether “Hawks” might actually be “Hawkeyes,” and before anyone can blink, a former special counsel’s name was dragged through the mud in front of a national audience. Even after being corrected in real time, Schmitt chose to leave the false impression lingering in the air, hoping that a joke about Caitlin Clark would somehow erase the fact that he had called Jack Smith a “dirtbag” and accused him of committing a federal crime in sworn testimony. In any sane world, a mistake this obvious would end with an apology and a vow to do better. In Schmitt’s world, it ended with a social media quip and a shrug. (And in case you needed more evidence that the news cycle has room for multiple strange political stories, the same newsletter that carried this tale also noted John Fetterman pushing back against claims that he’s a lazy senator and butt a bad Democrat—a reminder that the absurdity of political discourse is bipartisan and apparently endless.)
Ultimately, this whole bizarre episode is a perfect little parable about the state of political accountability. Schmitt’s refusal to admit error was not an isolated moment of stubbornness; it was a deliberate choice, born of a political culture where admitting a mistake is treated as weakness rather than integrity, where apologizing is seen as losing, and where doubling down is celebrated as toughness. But the cost of that “toughness” is real. It erodes public trust in all institutions, because when senators can confidently accuse witnesses of perjury based on a team-name mix-up and never say sorry, why would anyone believe anything they say? It also does a profound disservice to actual victims of perjury, people whose dishonesty genuinely undermines justice, because it dilutes the seriousness of the charge. Every time a politician cries wolf with a baseless accusation, the next real accusation becomes easier to dismiss. Schmitt apparently doesn’t see it that way. In his telling, he’s still not sure if Jack Smith lied, despite the fact that the only basis for his suspicion was his own inability to distinguish professional basketball from college basketball. He walked away from the hearing without an apology, without a retraction, without even a grumbled “my mistake.” Instead, he offered a joke and a question: “Who knew Jack Smith was a Caitlin Clark fan?” The answer, of course, is now all of us. But perchaps the better question is why a sitting senator would rather make himself the butt of a national joke than simply say, “I got it wrong.” And that is a question with no easy answer, only a sad, familiar one: because in today’s politics, admitting error is the one thing many politicians fear more than looking foolish.
If you’ve made it this far through this tale of Hawks, Hawkeyes, and high-stakes stubbornness, chances are you care about journalism that doesn’t just relay talking points but actually asks the follow-up questions, that checks whether senators are telling the truth, and that holds powerful people accountable even when they try to laugh off their mistakes. That kind of journalism doesn’t happen by magic. It takes editors, reporters, fact-checkers, and readers willing to support independent media. This article originally appeared on HuffPost, and HuffPost depends on readers like you to keep doing this work. In an era when high profile politicians can confused basketball teams and still refuse to apologize, we need fearless, unflinching reporting more than ever—reporting that treats perjury accusations with the seriousness they deserve, that catches the “Hawks” versus “Hawkeyes” discrepancy, and that doesn’t let powerful people off the hook because they crack a joke on social media. So if this kind of journalism matters to you, if you believe that senators should be held to a basic standard of accuracy, and if you enjoyed watching this absurd moment dissected with honesty and human touch, consider supporting HuffPost. Become a member today. Not because every story will be this entertaining, but because every story deserves this level of care. The next time a politician confidentlyaccuses someone of lying, we want a journalist there to check the transcripts, to listen to the witnesses, and to be brave enough to say, “You had the teams wrong, sir.” That’snot just good journalism. That’s the foundation of accountability. And it only survives with your support.