Former special counsel Jack Smith testified before the Senate on Tuesday about the investigations he led into President Trump. Lee Holmes, former chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee, joins "The Takeout" to discuss.
Page A2From§Eachthe midnight edition — 30 September 2026
Senator's Jack Smith perjury trap mistakes NBA game for college game; senator rules it not a mistake
As it ran on the front
I came about a form. That's the whole reason I'm in the building.
The transponder in my glovebox quit somewhere around the toll plaza in August, and the woman on the phone said bring the form down and get it stamped, so I brought the form down. The desk sent me to the third floor. The third floor gave me a phone number, and the phone number was a different building, ten minutes' walk, wrong department. I'd be standing in that hallway yet, except a young fellow came past pushing a cart of binders, and I asked what the binders were, and he said hearing, and I thought, well. Since I'm here.…
…(cont) Can I ask you something? It isn't my business. I wrote some of it down — hold on, it's in the coat, and this raincoat has one pocket that closes. That's the fan belt, eighty-one dollars, they wrote it on the back of the invoice... ah. Here.
The Hill, September twenty-fifth: the former special counsel "will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, his second appearance before Congress as they probe his investigation into President Trump." Second appearance. And this is the man who determined he would bring charges in the Mar-a-Lago documents case and in another one besides.
Same day, the twenty-fifth, the Washington Examiner writes up a House Judiciary interim staff report, fifty-seven pages, and I copied the title out longhand because it's a long one: "How Jack Smith and the Biden-Harris Department of Justice Disregarded the Separation of Powers to Spy on Their Political Opposition." Fifty-seven pages, before the man opens his mouth.
Then Tuesday happens. And today the Examiner has the Senator saying he "made no mistake when he tried to place former special counsel Jack Smith in Atlanta during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, rejecting the idea that he mixed up an NBA game and a college women's basketball game."
An NBA game and a college women's basketball game.
I'm sorry, I'm going to keep coming back to that. I can feel it already. Because the New York Times, the twenty-ninth, puts it this way: a Republican "eager to prove the former special counsel was dishonest appeared to instead demonstrate his own confusion over basic facts," and their headline has the perjury claim falling apart. Afterward CBS brought on Lee Holmes, the committee's own former chief counsel, to break the testimony down.
Forgive me, back to the two games. One is professional. One is college. Somebody put that question together before Tuesday — typed it, carried it into the room, probably on a cart like that kid's — and the answer that came back off it settled which game it was. Does the transcript say it was the one the Senator named?
There's a corner store I go into for milk, and by the register, under the glass, they keep the scratch tickets. Two of them are green with the same little pot of gold in the corner: the five-dollar one and the ten-dollar one. Five dollars apart. Last month I asked the fellow behind the counter for the green one, and he handed me the green one, and it was the wrong green one, and I said sorry, I meant the other one, and he swapped it, and the whole event took thirty seconds. Here's my trouble with myself. It never crossed my mind to tell him the five-dollar ticket was the ten-dollar ticket. It never crossed my mind to say I hadn't made a mistake. Is that because nobody at that counter is under oath?
Excuse me — you've got your coat on, I see that, and I've still got to find my form. One thing. They brought the man in a second time. Somebody wrote fifty-seven pages about him first. And the part everybody is reading today is one question about one game in one city: which game did the answer in that room turn out to be, the professional one or the college one? And if it's the second, what do we call the first, if it was not a mistake?
“Fifty-seven pages of staff report calling a prosecutor a spy, a second hauling-in under oath, a whole committee's Tuesday — and the thing that fell apart was a senator not knowing the difference between a pro game and a college women's game. That's not a slip, that's the whole operation: the gotcha was the product, the facts were optional, and when the facts said otherwise the answer was that nothing needed fixing. If a man can be wrong in a sworn hearing and then rule himself not wrong, the hearing isn't for finding anything out — it's a set, and we paid for the lights.”
“Both of those are basketball, so functionally the Senator was in the correct arena, conceptually. And look, there's a fifty-seven-page report here, which nobody is talking about, because the media would rather litigate a box score than the separation of powers — did I say box score? That doesn't sound like me. The point is he said it wasn't a mistake, and I don't see the transcript in front of me, so I'm not going to sit here and characterize a game I didn't attend.”
The receipts
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) said he made no mistake when he tried to place former special counsel Jack Smith in Atlanta during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, rejecting the idea that he mixed up an NBA game and a college women’s basketball game. During the hearing on Tuesday, Schmitt told Smith he had “a series […]
A Republican eager to prove the former special counsel was dishonest appeared to instead demonstrate his own confusion over basic facts.
· Jack Smith to testify before Senate Judiciary next week from the morgue, 25 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.