Jack Smith testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee today and apparently the senators made fools of themselves. I had to be away while it was live and couldn’t watch it, but it sounds like Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt made a total ass of himself. Which is not much of a leap for Eric Schmitt.
I was thinking not long ago that I haven’t heard much from him since he became a senator in 2023. But here is the Schmitt I remember from Missouri. Schmitt obviously thought he had a first rate gotcha in the claim that Smith had attended an N.B.A. game in Atlanta as a pretense to secretly meet with Fani Willis and other prosecutors pursuing Trump there. But instead of being in Atlanta watching the Atlanta Hawks, Smith was at the University of Maryland watching a women’s basketball game between Maryland and the Iowa Hawkeyes. Facepalm!
Other outtakes I’ve seen just make the whole exercise look ridiculous. At one point Senator John Kennedy was grilling Smith about whether he believed in the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny.
In other news: I’m feeling a bit left out because I’ve never seen the Trump political ads for television paid for by our tax dollars I’ve only seen bits of them, as shown in this news story:
CNBC is reporting that the ads were funded from the Homeland Security budget. Well, WSJ is reporting, but that’s behind a paywall. Here are key points:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection funded the taxpayer-backed television ads featuring President Donald Trump that have drawn bipartisan scrutiny ahead of the midterm election, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Top congressional Democrats say the administration dedicated $20 million to the effort, including funds provided to CBP through Republicans’ “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
Trump personally pushed for the ads and was involved in their creation, according to the Journal, as lawmakers question whether taxpayer funds were improperly used for political messaging.
Although some advertising agency was paid a ton of money for the ads the ads, I’m hearing they were produced by the White House. video team, and Trump was involved in putting them together. The White House calls them “public service announcements” and “patriotic,” but all they do is promote Trump. I wonder how this is going over with the general public?
Last night, conservative commentators on the Charlie Kirk show were promoting how Schmitt proved Smith perjured himself. Somehow, they completely failed to mention how Klobuchar debunked the claim.
What is ever so amazing to this "gotcha," was, it depended on a conspiracy theory that doesn't actually make sense. Why would someone go to Atlanta, to discuss stuff, when there are perfectly usable phones in everyone's hip pocket?
I mean, this is the whole Tarmac Meeting deal all over; "because they were in physical proximity, they might have hatched a criminal conspiracy that they could have hatched without either of them ever in the same physical space as the other!"
Bill Clinton didn't need to meet someone on a tarmac to offer her a bribe, he could send an e-mail, or make a phone call, from a frickin' payphone.
The problem is, if enough people repeat a lie, other people might start to think there's truth to it. "They wouldn't keep saying this, over and over, over that hearing… right? So it must be something else!" But we know differently, now. People will lie, and try to make you believe reality is uncertain.
I have cognitive difficulties during seizure like events – there's nothing I despise more than people giving me a false picture of reality, because sometimes, I can't tell that they're joking. And then they laugh at me, ha ha, so funny, you having extreme pain, and believed me about something false! A rubber crutch is a similar joke, watch the cripple try to put weight on it, ha ha ha… .So I have a special hate for rightwing noise.
(I know, old, maybe dead thread, but today I'm pissy enough that I wanted to write something angry.)
The NYT ran some video and a story about Schmitt's antics. He thought he had dirt on Smith but just had a blunder. Schmitt should have apologized for his false accusation but did not. He repeated his derogatory remark and left the proceedings. A normal person would have died from embarrassment. Obviously, Schmitt is nowhere near normal person status.
I did listen to Adam Schiff's questioning of Smith in part. I thought it awesome. He focused on facts. The facts from his first report which remain uncontested. The facts that show strong evidence Trump attempted to alter an election. Smith could not even talk about his second report. This was about the documents. Judge Cannon continues to hide these facts from the public and history. It is exasperating.
The telling thing is that even their "gotchas" are based on wild assumptions. Maybe a basketball game is just a basketball game. All they have, under the best of circumstances, is innuendo.
What impressed me is how cool, calm, collected, and even deferential Smith remained in the face of hostile questioning. He told Lindsay Graham's sister that her brother was a patriot, not a target of his investigations, and would likely be a witness, for example. Thank God Klobuchar is a mid-west sports fan and had the data at her fingertips to rebut Schmitt's nonsense.
Most of the videos are face-on, the camera looking into Smith's face. If you can find one that's a side-shot, he's clearly all alone in the hot seat, with chairs ringed all around him, which would make anybody nervous. Glad it's him and not me.
Besides seeing Klobuchar embarass Schmidt, I saw a video of Katie Britt, the senator from Alabama with the most incredible look of frozen disbelief on her face, as the whole thing unfolded. "How could we possibly be wrong?" is what it said.
Both Michael Wolff – 45's biographer – and a psychic I follow say that, even with a blue wave, and a shift in power, Trump is never going to leave. By this, they mean that he's going to attempt even more ridiculous stunts, simply because he needs the attention. I suspect this, plus his continued sundowning is going to finally make him relinquish power next year. The powers that be will finally have had enough.
This same psychic says to expect "Trump – the Musical" in a couple years. We're all going to need to laugh and if it's done right, this will help bring about the catharsis this country so badly needs. I kept thinking of the closing number to "The Producers", Prisoners of Love
Is Schmitt still in the running to be J.D. Vance's presidential running mate?
Ron Filipkowski posted these numbers on bluesky:
Mentions on Fox shows of the very newsworthy confrontation
between Schmitt and Jack Smith:
Ingraham (7-8pm): 0
Watters (8-9): 0
Hannity (9-10): 0
Gutfeld (10-11): 0
Fox & Friends this AM: 0
Their audience will probably never know. They're in their own bubble.
Bubbles are telling, having been kept in a bubble or tried to be kept that way many times. Out of the loop by design. You learn to read the silence and the silence is golden. Sooner or later their ignorance loses its bliss as the bubble explodes around them. Bubbles are well known to be on the fragile side.
Heather Cox Richardson thinks it was a set up. Schmitt knew exactly what he was doing. The "evidence" flashed briefly before the camera and disappeared. Schmitt later appeared on a right wing podcast, armed with a sound bite, an attempt to fire up the base. It doesn't matter that it was entirely bogus, it's just outrage to feed the base.
The psychic I mentioned upstream, said be aware that there will be all kinds of false flag operations going on before the election. One of them is that $15 billion steel mill announced for Iowa. It's from a company based in India, that went bankrupt trying to make it happen in Minnesota, where the iron ore comes from. The announcement is little more than hope for the voters at this point.
Perhaps more substantial is a $500 Obamacare refund.
Any stupid thing is possible with these people.
I don't believe this was a "mistake" as much as it was an attempt to bamboozle that went wrong. They knew Smith wasn't at an Atlanta Hawks game on that day. This is why Schmitt had his aide flash the texts that supposedly showed Smith was in Atlanta, and then refuse to display them so Smith could see them, because he knew the texts didn't mention Atlanta or the Atlanta Hawks. Never mind the fact that even if he was there that's not "proof" he would have met with Willis. All the texts showed was that Smith was going to an event somewhere on that day. No one in their right mind would point to those texts as proof Smith was at an Atlanta Hawks home game that day.
Schmitt was counting on no one examining the texts, and that he wouldn't be called out as a sports imbecile who didn't know the difference between the Iowa Hawkeyes and Atlanta Hawks.
"Just Make It Stop"
To me I could really care less what Trump does. He is in office for another two years, there are going to be daily outrages, it is just the way he rolls. The man is an asshole, he is going to act like an asshole. It is impossible to ignore his antics but I sure as hell am not going to get bent out of shape over any of it. Once the democrats win and have the gavel next year it will only get worse, but at least he won't be able bury all of his corruption like the GOP allows now. Trump controls the DOJ and the supreme court, nothing is going to happen to him legally, we are just going to have to wait the old miserable demented fool out!
At this point in time, I am totally focused on the upcoming mid-terms. This is a local matter and I think everyone of good will should be figuring out what he/she can do to a) maximize to the utmost turnout voters who will not vote for R's (progressives, Dems, Independents, disaffected R's); and b) participate in any way possible in your state to protect the integrity of the election from Federal interference.
Things are moving in the right direction, but the fascists are going to go full bore in trying to disrupt the comeuppance that is looming, and they will not shy away from breaking laws in order to disrupt. We need to get Congress to stop rubber-stamping the fascist actions of the administration.