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It was meant to be a dramatic confrontation, a public accusation of perjury against Jack Smith, the special counsel who investigated Donald J. Trump. Instead, Senator Eric Schmitt’s amateur sleuthing into basketball led him to the wrong game, league and state.
During a four-hour Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Mr. Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri, struck a conspiratorial tone and asked Mr. Smith if he had attended an Atlanta Hawks home game in February 2024.
Mr. Schmitt focused on the basketball game in the hopes that he could show Mr. Smith had perjured himself and was involved in a conspiracy with local Atlanta prosecutors to ensnare Mr. Trump. In a hearing where Republicans repeatedly accused Mr. Smith of lying, what Mr. Schmitt first presented as smoking-gun evidence against Mr. Smith turned out to be a misfire.
During his testimony, Mr. Smith appeared deeply confused by Mr. Schmitt’s question. “I definitely did not go to a Hawks game,” he said. “I’m sure of that.”
Mr. Schmitt seemed confident he had just caught Mr. Smith in a lie. It was part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump’s Republican allies to characterize Mr. Smith as politically partisan, a man with an ax to grind not just against a former president, but also the Republican establishment. Mr. Smith has already defended his work before Congress, and Republicans have claimed that his past testimony included perjury.
On Tuesday, Mr. Schmitt argued that Mr. Smith had lied again, this time about a basketball game. If the prosecutor was in Atlanta, Mr. Schmitt suggested, he might have met with the local district attorney, Fani Willis, who also pursued a criminal case against Mr. Trump.
Mr. Schmitt’s Republican colleague from Louisiana, John Kennedy, stood next to him helping hold up a poster board showing text messages among members of Mr. Smith’s special counsel team from Feb. 3, 2024, discussing seats at a basketball game.
“I don’t think you know we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t perjure yourself,” Mr. Schmitt said, even as the poster board was swiftly taken down, too quickly for most in the room to read it.
When the former special counsel insisted he had not gone to see the Atlanta Hawks play in that time period, Mr. Schmitt declared, “I think you’ve already perjured yourself,” and called Mr. Smith a “dirtbag.”
The accusation appeared to unravel almost immediately.
Invited to respond by Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, Mr. Smith said he had, in fact, attended a basketball game on that day, but it was to see the Iowa Hawkeyes at the University of Maryland. That night, Caitlin Clark, the star point guard who now plays in the W.N.B.A., scored 38 points and had 12 assists.
Ms. Klobuchar suggested that Mr. Schmitt’s accusation was rooted in the senator’s confusion between the “Hawks” of Atlanta and the “Hawkeyes” of Iowa.
Mr. Schmitt declared that he still stood by calling Mr. Smith a “dirtbag,” then left the hearing.
The exchange took up just four minutes of the hearing. But it showed how eager the Republicans were to paint Mr. Smith as an out-of-control partisan — and to find a basis to accuse him of a crime at a time when the Justice Department has proved receptive to pursuing the people who investigated Mr. Trump.
A central issue was Mr. Smith’s subpoenas for lawmakers’ phone records as he and his team sought to trace Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on Congress to block Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College certification.
As part of that effort, investigators also examined whether Mr. Trump had defrauded his supporters when he raised vast sums after the election promising to expose fraud that did not happen. They also subpoenaed financial records of Republican-aligned groups as they traced what actually happened to the money.
That effort did not result in charges.
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and others argued that when Mr. Smith subpoenaed phone records of Republican lawmakers, and sought court orders keeping those subpoenas secret, he showed that his prosecutorial ambitions extended far beyond Mr. Trump.
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