Senate hearing titled "Targeting of Republicans" reveals special counsel seized nearly 5,000 of their checks

…(cont) There's a part of that hearing I keep coming back to, not the checks, something else. A senator, Schmitt, tried to catch Mr. Smith on whether he'd gone to a basketball game, Hawks and Warriors, February third, two years back. Mr. Smith said he hadn't, and Common Dreams says the trap fell apart in real time. Why didn't the checks need a trap like that one did? They just got read into the record — Grassley's record, not a cross-examination.

Here's where I had to flip back in the notebook. The outlet that printed the checks number, The Federalist, is the same outlet running a piece this week asking who pays if "Jack Smith's goons" don't. They ran the checks count on the Tuesday of the hearing, and the op-ed after, saying innocent Americans will bear the brunt if elected officials don't punish Smith and the others. Which bill do they mean? The checks already came out of somebody's account. I don't see a second number for what the punishing costs, and I looked.

This morning — October seventh, more than a week past that Tuesday hearing — Fox News runs a piece saying declassified documents raise questions about Mr. Smith's trial testimony. Not the Senate testimony; the trial testimony — the Fox headline is careful about that, and so am I. I read it twice to get the date right. This time there's one hearing, one Tuesday, and one story eight days later about an older case. Has anyone put them in the same file yet? I didn't find that page.

I tried to picture the number out in the garage, where I keep the toolbox and a coffee can of bolts I never sort. I started counting those bolts while the car charged — fan belt again — and gave up past four hundred, bored, and that can doesn't even close right. That count is something like twelve of those cans. I don't own twelve coffee cans. The Senate, apparently, does.

Oh — one more thing, before I close the notebook. The hearing title says the committee was overseeing the targeting of Republicans. The only count on the page in front of me isn't a count of anything done to one. It's a count of what one investigation kept. Does the record anywhere put a number on cases Mr. Smith brought that didn't hold up? I went looking. The only number I've got, the one I keep writing down, is the checks — nearly five thousand checks.