From J6 insurrection to Schmitt's humiliation, a straight line

Let's not say goodbye to Eric Schmitt just yet.

His story is about more than a power-mad senator falling on his face. It's part of a larger story about the Republicans defending the leader of an insurrection against an investigation that, as Jack Smith said Tuesday, "developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation." Schmitt's story is part of a broader attempt by the Republicans to punish Jack Smith for prosecuting Donald Trump's treason.

If we say goodbye now, we miss a chance to say that.

According to new reporting last night by MS Now, the text messages from 2024 from Smith's team that Eric Schmitt presented at Tuesday's hearing were provided by the US Department of Justice, which is to say, by US Attorney General Todd Blanche. They were sent to the "GOP staff on the Judiciary Committee," which is to say, to the panel's chairman, Chuck Grassley.

According to the report, Grassley assembled a memo for members of the committee before the hearing, but did not include the texts in that memo. (He also did not share the texts with the panel's Democrats.) Importantly, Schmitt came to Grassley, asking for the texts. (It's unclear who alerted Schmitt to the texts or to the fact that Grassley had them.) "After Schmitt’s team expressed interest, they received access to the texts," MS Now reported.

Schmitt wanted the texts, because he believed they were proof of collusion between Smith and Fanni Willis. She is the Fulton County district attorney who indicted Trump for interfering with elections in Georgia. Schmitt believed the texts placed Smith in Atlanta the day after her case began to fall apart. (Willis and the prosecutor in charge of the Trump investigation had a sexual affair.) Schmitt hoped to use the texts during testimony to catch Smith in a lie about his whereabouts, and pave the way for future prosecution on perjury.

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As you know, the gambit backfired. Smith was not in Georgia watching Atlanta's Hawks. He was in Maryland watching an away game of Iowa's Hawkeyes. (Turns out Smith is a fan of Caitlin Clark, the former star player for the University of Iowa. Amy Klobuchar's quick thinking brought Schmitt's Hawks v Hawkeyes mistake to light.) No one is really sure what it would have meant if Smith had been in Atlanta. Correlation – that Smith and Willis could have been in the same city at the same time – is not causation. It is not proof of a conspiracy between them against Trump. In any case, Schmitt was wrong, spectacularly wrong. His dreams of being JD Vance's vice presidential running mate seemed to go poof on live TV.

Jonathan Bernstein noted today that Schmitt's humiliation stems from the fact that the rightwing media he consumes has made the Republican Party extremely lazy. Why bother to vet information when every allegation against the Democrats, no matter how unbelievable, is believed? He tracks the pattern going all the way back to Newt Gingrich in the 1980s. Bernstein suggested that the laziness is part of the deeper malignancy affecting the GOP.

Jamie Raskin made a similar point. The Maryland congressman told CNN Tuesday that Schmitt's intentions were "completely sinister" but that his execution was "totally inept." He "went in with the idea of setting a perjury trap for Jack Smith," Raskin said, but "as ever with maga, we are saved from their absolute malice and evil by their complete incompetence."

Which brings me back to last night's MS Now report. It read as if to suggest an awareness on somebody's part, whether in the Congress or in the administration, or both, that it would best to place full responsibility for Tuesday's debacle entirely on Schmitt. The report's subtext seemed to be that even though the text messages came from Blanche, who answers only to Donald Trump, the president had nothing to do with it. A source in the story seemed keen on making sure that it was understood that Schmitt's team was told that the texts had not been vetted, with the implication being that the story ends with Schmitt's humiliation.

MS Now: "Judiciary staff, however, explicitly warned Schmitt’s team that the texts were unvetted and that it was their responsibility to verify the information, the source said."

But the story does not end with Schmitt, because his story is part of a larger story – a conspiracy, you might say – to stop the public from fully understanding what the president did in the wake of his defeat to Joe Biden, which is to say that he's guilty of treason. As Jack Smith said Tuesday, "the charges against President Trump were the result of the evidence. Grand juries in two separate districts reached this conclusion based on his actions ... Rather than accept his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results and prevent the lawful transfer of power."

That "criminal scheme" is ongoing. There is a straight line between the insurrection of January 6, 2021, and Schmitt's humiliation. The president, or someone acting on his behalf, gave the senator, via Chuck Grassley, text messages about Jack Smith's whereabouts that they all believed was evidence that was strong enough, at least by rightwing media standards, to smear Smith's integrity, thus preventing the truth from being clear.

"You have weaponized the Department of Justice against political enemies to an extent that has never happened in the history of this country," Schmitt told Smith Tuesday. "You will go down as a total dirtbag." But, as MS Now reported, "Trump appointees have engaged in a highly unusual practice of sharing a broad swath of sensitive material, in this case from the special counsel’s investigation, as Republicans scour files for evidence that Smith and his staff engaged in misconduct." Who is really weaponizing the DOJ? Who's the real dirtbag?

It's tempting to say that Eric Schmitt looked so bad that he made Jack Smith look good – that Smith's authority as a lawman was evident in comparison to Schmitt's beclownmanship. But the truth doesn't speak for itself. It has to be spoken for. That's why I hope the Democrats recognize Schmitt as being representative of the malign project that is holding up Trump. Inept, incompetent, sinister, evil – the root of it all is corruption. I hope the Democrats build on Amy Klobuchar's followup interview during which she said, in a slightly different context, that the American people are making the connection between corruption and affordability.

"When people are hurting this much and they literally can’t pay their bills, that [Donald Trump] then spends government money, instead of on the tax credits to help people pay for their insurance, he spends it on himself on an ad to glorify himself," Klobuchar told MS Now. "They are making the connection now out there on corruption and affordability."

There's a straight line from J6 insurrection to the affordability crisis.

But that's a story for another time.

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