Former special counsel Jack Smith gathered reporters’ private messages as part of his “Arctic Frost” investigation, according to a whistleblower disclosure to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA). The records show Smith’s team received communications involving reporters from more than a dozen national news…
Page A5From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 30 September 2026
THE AIRBALL
Schmitt insists his sworn misstatement 'was not a mistake,' record corrects him twice more the same day
As it ran on the front
I came about a lottery ticket. It didn't pay, and it wouldn't say why — just sat there in the machine blinking a code at me. The young woman at the register said that's not our machine, that's the state's machine, and gave me a number to call, which I will call, eventually. While we sorted out whose problem it was, the radio behind the counter — they keep it going all day, the kind of station where a man just talks — had a Senate hearing on, and I stood there long enough that it stopped being background. Since I was standing there anyway. Can I ask you something? It isn't my business, exactly.
I wrote this down, so bear with me while I find it. Here it is. Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee. Senator Eric Schmitt is questioning Jack Smith, the man he'd like very much to have caught in something, about a basketball game — an NBA game, when he meant a college one — in sworn testimony, in the same breath he's using to try to trap somebody else. And when the record doesn't cooperate, the senator doesn't call it a slip. He says it wasn't a mistake.…
…(cont) I'm sorry, I keep coming back to this, but the date matters more than I want it to. That same Tuesday — not the day after, not later in the week, the same day — a whistleblower handed Chairman Grassley a disclosure saying Jack Smith's team, during the Arctic Frost investigation, had gathered the private messages of reporters from more than a dozen news organizations. The committee hadn't been sitting on its hands waiting for that. Fox News had already put out the transcripts on the 22nd. The Daily Caller had the word lawless attached to the investigation by the 23rd. By the 25th there was an op-ed arguing the whole operation wasn't an accident, it was a strategy — and The Hill had already told everyone Smith would be back testifying the following Tuesday. So by the time the senator sat down to say his own mix-up wasn't a mistake, the paperwork sitting a few desks over said the man he was questioning had done something rather larger, on purpose, first.
I don't mean to circle back again, but there's a cost side to this I can't get past. That same Tuesday, before six in the morning, a story ran saying Schmitt was quietly running for vice president. By early afternoon, it was finished. Six hours. Three years in the Senate was the entire résumé the piece had to work with, and it didn't survive a workday.
I know I've mentioned this already, and I apologize, but somebody had to actually carry that whistleblower disclosure into the room — paper, a dozen-plus news organizations named on it, handed across a table to a committee that had spent the better part of a week deciding the word for what was on it. Nobody carried anything in for the senator's mix-up. He just said it out loud, and expected the room to take his word over the scoreboard.
My wife says I get like this about the fan belt too — I'm sorry, I know — find one loose thing and keep going back to check it. Maybe. But I only heard the phrase used once, by anybody sworn to tell the truth that day, and it was the senator, about himself.
Excuse me — before you go. The senator has a word too, from that same Tuesday, in that same room, for his own count in his own sworn testimony: not a mistake. Is that the same word, said twice, or two different words for the same thing?
“This guy stood up under oath and said his own screwup was on purpose, and by the end of the same day the record showed the man he was trying to nail had done the actual on-purpose thing — vacuuming up a dozen newsrooms' private messages. Meanwhile his own shot at the number two job lasted six hours, shorter than a jury pool. That's not a bad week, that's a tell.”
“Look, the senator was making a point about Smith's credibility, and it's actually more important that Americans learn their own government collected journalists' private messages — wait, did I just hand them that story? That's not — that's not the talking point I was given.”
Earlier in this story
- Senator's Jack Smith perjury trap mistakes NBA game for college game; senator rules it not a mistake By Lou · the midnight edition, 30 September 2026
The receipts
Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-MO) unsubtle bid for the 2028 vice presidency lasted less than six hours. It lived at the hands of a press even more idiotic than our politicians, and it died by suicide through hubris.
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 […]
· 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
· Jack Smith Violated Constitution To Spy On Republicans In Lawless ‘Arctic Frost’ Investigation, Committee Alleges from the morgue, 23 Sep 2026
· House Republicans drop Jack Smith transcripts in explosive Arctic Frost records fight from the morgue, 22 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.