Schmitt sets a trap for Jack Smith, then can't remember which basketball teams played.

Sen. Eric Schmitt was doing his job Tuesday, is the point, and the point holds up if you don't look at the transcript. The senator walked into the Judiciary Committee room with a real predicate: a week before, on September 23, the House Judiciary Committee released a 57-page interim staff report accusing Jack Smith's office of using an operation called "Arctic Frost" to seize phone records from 44 sitting lawmakers while skirting the Speech or Debate Clause, the same day Chairman Jim Jordan told Fox News the special counsel had tried to "sway" the 2024 election and the Daily Caller called the investigation "lawless." That is a real allegation, filed by a real committee, and a senator who wants to ask a real witness about it is doing exactly what a Judiciary Committee member is supposed to do. Two days later, on September 25, The Hill confirmed Smith would testify the following Tuesday — Schmitt had time to build a real question. What he showed up with, on the record, in front of live cameras, was a question about whether the special counsel had attended a February 2024 NBA game between the Hawks and the Golden State Warriors in Atlanta. That was not — that's not actually the Arctic Frost question at all, is it. That was a basketball question.

The senator's defense, given to The Hill after the fact, is that his job "is to ask questions." True. The House report is still 57 pages long. The phone-records allegation is still on the record, unresolved, headline first, evidence pending. None of that got any less true or less false on Tuesday. What got settled on Tuesday is that the senator who was supposed to prosecute the case in the room could not keep his own facts straight long enough to land the question — and "my job is to ask questions" is not a defense of the question. It's an admission that nobody checked whether it was a good one.