Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-MO) effort to place former special counsel Jack Smith in Atlanta amid the Fani Willis controversy hit a snag on Tuesday when Smith said the basketball game he remembered attending featured Caitlin Clark in Maryland, not a supposed NBA game in the Peach State. The exchange during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s…
Page A5From§Eachthe noon edition — 29 September 2026
ARCTIC FROST
Jack Smith accuses Trump of serious crimes; Senate Judiciary spends the hearing on a basketball seating chart.
As it ran on the front
It appears once, in the opening statement, and the transcript spends the rest of the hearing somewhere else entirely.
Sen. Eric Schmitt spent his turn trying to place Smith at a basketball game in Atlanta, next to the Fani Willis case. Smith said the game he remembered featured Caitlin Clark, in Maryland. The senator's placement missed the state.…
…(cont) Sen. John Kennedy pressed Smith, multiple times, on his conversations with Attorney General Merrick Garland and on the subpoenaed congressional phone records — the same subpoenas House Republicans had released as transcripts a week earlier, on Sept. 22, alleging they'd improperly reached GOP lawmakers' calls. Kennedy folded his verdict into the same breath: "You make me want to throw up in my mouth."
The New York Post ran with Republicans' word for the broader Arctic Frost matter, Smith's probe of "Trump and Republican lawmakers" — corrupt.
None of this was improvised on the day. On Sept. 23, the Daily Caller had already reported the committee's allegation that Smith "violated the Constitution" running Arctic Frost. On Sept. 25, the House Judiciary Committee's 57-page interim report carried the title Republicans would spend Tuesday performing: "How Jack Smith and the Biden-Harris Department of Justice Disregarded the Separation of Powers to Spy on Their Political Opposition." That same week, the Hill had reported only that Smith would testify "next week." By Tuesday, the week had already produced a script, and the hearing followed it.
The Daily Caller's exclusive, filed the same day as the hearing, undercut Smith's own account of how the classified-documents probe began. The Washington Post reported Smith's answer to all of it: he would not "be silenced by continued threats of prosecution." The sentence that opened the hearing — the crimes — got said once. The rest of the day belonged to the arena, the tone, and the file that arrived to answer it instead.
“They didn't rebut the crimes, they buried them under a seating chart and a senator's stomach, and that's not an accident, that's the whole play — you write the verdict on Sept. 25, you stage the hearing on the 29th, and by lunchtime nobody's talking about the president, they're talking about a basketball game and a phone call with Garland. The con is timing: you can't out-argue "serious crimes," so you flood the transcript until the sentence drowns in trivia and grievance. Watch what they protect when the actual accusation never gets a real answer — that's the tell, every time.”
“Look, the committee has a job, and that job is oversight of prosecutorial abuse, so when Republicans spend a hearing on Arctic Frost subpoenas and a basketball game, that's — okay, that's not oversight, that's a bit. But the underlying allegation, that Smith's team reached congressional phone records, that's a real document. I'm not saying the Caitlin Clark thing was strategy. I'm saying — why would I be defending a seating chart. Next question.”
The receipts
EXCLUSIVE: Newly Released Records Undercut Jack Smith’s Account Of How Trump Classified Documents Probe Began
Former special counsel Jack Smith is testifying before the House Judiciary Committee about his investigations into President Trump. Here's his opening statement.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) grilled former special counsel Jack Smith during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on his relationship to higher-ups in the Biden administration and his subpoenaing of congressional phone records on Tuesday. Kennedy pressed Smith multiple times on his personal feelings about former President Joe…
Jack Smith returned to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to defend his derailed efforts to prosecute President Donald Trump, telling lawmakers he would not “be silenced by continued threats of prosecution” from the president.
Former special counsel Jack Smith squared off with Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee who accused him Tuesday of illegally targeting Trump and GOP lawmakers.
'The Federalist has fearlessly exposed Deep State corruption and DOJ lies and lawfare. Spying on us was apparently part of Jack Smith’s plot to get revenge against us.'
· Jack Smith to testify before Senate Judiciary next week from the morgue, 25 Sep 2026
· House Republicans drop Jack Smith transcripts in explosive Arctic Frost records fight from the morgue, 22 Sep 2026
· Jack Smith Violated Constitution To Spy On Republicans In Lawless ‘Arctic Frost’ Investigation, Committee Alleges from the morgue, 23 Sep 2026
· Jack Smith’s election interference wasn’t an accident. It was the strategy from the morgue, 25 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.