anatomy of a scandal

Of all the silly things happening in politics lately, my candidate for the silliest is Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO)'s attempt to play "gotcha" with Jack Smith, the federal prosecutor who pulled up so many cases for DT's criminality, earning from his antagonist the label "deranged." You can see the whole thing outline by Seth Meyers here; I've cued this to delete a couple minutes of preliminary fooforall.

But here I'd like to deconstruct it slightly. Schmitt's idea of a gotcha was to imply previously-unknown collusion between Smith and Fani Willis, the Georgia state prosecutor who was pursuing her own cases against DT for election fraud. And to show collusion would prove what, exactly? We never got that far, but presumably if you could get Smith to deny it while showing it was true, you'd have presumption of malfeasance.

But it never even got that far, either. All we had was Schmitt claiming and Smith denying that he'd been in Atlanta on a given day. All Schmitt claimed he had evidence of was Smith attending a basketball game that day, an NBA match between the Atalnta Hawks and the Golden State Warriors. Anything involving Fani Willis would have to lurk unspoken.

But, of course, Schmitt didn't even have that. Asked about the game, Smith said he wasn't there; where he was, he said, was at a college basketball game hosted by the University of Maryland, near D.C. where he lives, vs. the University of Iowa Hawkeyes.

Hawks. Hawkeyes. It was Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) who suggested that Schmitt had just confused the teams' nicknames. And that's how the story is being told.

But in fact it didn't even get that far. The posterboard showing the supposedly damning e-mails from Smith's staff was waved around but hard to see. But it does appear clearly between 9:45 and 9:50 on Meyers' video. At which point it reveals that the e-mails were just a qu8ick exchange about Smith's seating arrangements and confirming he was there. It doesn't even say it was a basketball game! Maybe Schmitt had other documentary evidence on that, but he admitted (clips at 11:07-11:15 of Meyers' video) that he just looked up the NBA schedule for that day, found the game in Atlanta, and figured he had his gotcha. The similarity of the team names was a pure coincidence.

What a moronic excuse for a political scandal.