Former US special counsel Jack Smith attends a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, September 29, 2026.
A former special prosecutor’s epic takedown of a fumbled MAGA conspiracy theory before viewers on Tuesday had CNN anchor Kasie Hunt wondering if the GOP was finally done with pursuing half-baked attacks on Jack Smith.
“Could that be it? Could that be it?” Hunt later asked her panel on CNN’s “The Arena with Kasie Hunt.”
“I think this is what political scientists often refer to as a face plant,” CNN analyst and Axios political reporter Alex Thompson responded, referring to Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-MO) failed attack on Smith before Smith decimated Schmitt on live television.
Schmitt claimed he had text messages from Smith's own team that Smith was in Atlanta Feb. 2024, one day after DA Fani Willis admitted a relationship with co-worker Nathan Wade, in addition to various name-calling and verbal attacks. But Smith deftly destroyed Schmitt by explaining that he had attended an entirely different game.
“It was a rough moment, and I say that as someone who likes Eric Schmidt very much,” admitted GOP pundit and possible White House media candidate Scott Jennings. “Uh, and I think he's been a really good politician and senator in Missouri. So obviously this was a mistake.”
But Jennings rallied as best he could, pointing out that what Republicans are really worried about with Smith is that he obtained communications from members of Congress regarding local Republican donors who had written checks for five and $10.
“Apparently, he got records of at least one journalist, Mollie Hemingway, from the Federalist. And so, the Republican argument here has been that this was partisan, uh, that this was dramatic amount of overstepping, uh, and that it really did encroach upon the job duties of a lot of these senators and members of congress that he was digging into, in their view, for no good reason and without disclosing it to them at the time,” said Jennings. “So, I think legitimate concerns were aired, even if there was a rough moment on the committee today.”
But panelist and former prosecutor Ellie Honig told Jennings that Republican lawmakers flubbed their whole argument.
“The way that Republicans have chosen to attack Smith is just not the most effective way to criticize him. If you want to criticize the guy, you can point out that his entire career leading up to the Trump prosecution was marked by overcharging and over aggression. He had high profile cases rejected by judges, by juries, unanimously in one case by the Supreme Court. You can
point out the fact that he asked for a gag order that violated Donald Trump's First Amendment right, to the point where a judge and a court of appeals judge overturned Smith's gag order. You can point to the fact that he insisted on trying Trump for months after an indictment with 13 million pages of discovery. There's no way Trump could have engaged his due process to prepare for trial. You can point to the fact that he dumped a whole bunch of information into the public sector in October of 2024 by reversing the rules of criminal procedure. There are very effective and fair criticisms of smith, but these Republican senators are not on them at all,” said Honig.
Jennings quickly glommed onto Honig’s hurled life-saver, saying “listen to Elie. This guy made mistake after mistake, and it all leads back to the central Republican argument that this was overly partisan, overly prosecuted. And that was the point of the hearing today.”
Hunt agreed that “Elie ... did a better job than the senators that we saw.”
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