Jack Smith Did Not Conspire Against Donald Trump While Watching Steph Curry Score 60 Points In An Overtime Loss To The Hawks

David Roth, writing at Defector, absolutely nails this moment in time.

The most salient part of the accusation that Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt lodged against former special prosecutor Jack Smith in a Senate hearing on Tuesday is that it was wrong. It was ecstatically and grandiosely wrong, and obviously wrong in ways that even a rudimentary blog-level fact check would have caught. It was wrong in ways that would only be possible at this particular low ebb in American political and broader executive function—based on unverified and unvetted information given only to Republican Senators by the Department of Justice, too-hastily put to oafish misuse by well-credentialed chumps of roughly equal laziness and ambition in the pursuit of a spiteful but otherwise opaque end.

In that sense, it is extremely familiar. If it hadn't ended with Schmitt dangling upside down and blustering like the previously undiscovered suburban version of Yosemite Sam after becoming ensnared in his own malfunctioning perjury trap, it might not even have been news at all. In absolute terms, it was as stupid as more or less anything that's happened on the floor of the United States Senate in a century or so, a half-assed 16x-speed gloss on McCarthyism from people who do not really know what that or anything else was, and whose attention spans have left them incapable of parsing even your wordier memes. In relative terms, this is just what our government is like much of the time.

It is not difficult to see what Schmitt was trying to do, and it is extremely easy to see how and why he and his staff of pale and chittering Renfields screwed it up. That failure is grounded in a tragicomic lack of Ball Knowledge, but also in either a more overtly comic inattention to detail, an aversion to even light investigative work, or both. Schmitt et al went through the DOJ's dump of Smith's text messages and believed they had found evidence of him secretly attending an Atlanta Hawks home game against the Golden State Warriors on Feb. 3, 2024. Accusing someone of attending a Hawks game is rude on the merits, but neither libelous nor scandalous in its own right; why Schmitt believed this was newsworthy, let alone a suitably bouncy springboard to soft-launch his own Vice Presidential ambitions, is something else entirely.

I love reading Roth more than almost any writer when describing the political environment we are in currently, but it’s important to remember this continues to be utterly exhausting. These people all just suck so much. In the real world, all of these people would be fired on the spot for incompetence.