Jack Smith, former special counsel at the Justice Department, testifies before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., US, September 29, 2026.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist said she would have felt suicidal if she had made a mistake as egregious and foolish as that committed by Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) when he tried to pull a "gotcha" on Jack Smith, the prosecutor who attempted to hold President Donald Trump accountable for his 2020-2021 insurrection.
"Here's what I would say," said MS NOW host Chris Hayes on Tuesday when interviewing the acclaimed Carol Leonnig. Hayes and Leonnig were discussing how Schmitt tried to prove Smith had lied about never being to Atlanta — and, by implication, had colluded with another prosecutor investigating Trump — by showing he had been to an Atlanta Hawks game. It was quickly proved that in fact Smith had attended a basketball game by a team called the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, one held near his home in Maryland. Even conservative commentators like Scott Jennings admitted Schmitt embarrassed himself, while right-wing pundits like Sean Hannity and Benny Johnson, who initially characterized the encounter as a win for Schmitt, later deleted their posts.
"You talk to all sorts of people in the world who have different views of the media," Hayes told Leonnig. "And one of the things I always say is, when we do this show here, us and the whole team, people know where I'm coming from, what my views are, but we really do try to make sure we get things right. It's a real point of pride. We do our due diligence. And I just can't believe that level of sloppiness."
Leonnig replied, "I think there are some journalists who might have, I don't mean to be grim, but would have been suicidal" if they had made that kind of mistake. "It's not cool and it's not copacetic, and it would be heart palpitations forever."
She added, "I'm a reporter. I'm not an anchor. I'm not a host... but I agree with you about MS NOW's position, which is: okay, yeah, we ask hard questions. As a network, the anchors are generally progressive-leaning and worried about democracy, but the reporting here is fact-based. And my jaw opened as far as it could when Schmitt began accusing Jack Smith of perjury. I could see Jack Smith saying, 'Whoa, whoa, I've never been to Atlanta, except maybe through the airport on a connecting flight.'"
She concluded, "The guy is being criticized for various things, but he's not going to perjure himself. He's a [careful] lawyer. And so that was all going very, very fast in front of our eyes. That's a problem I think all of us fact-based journalists are kind of wrestling with: this administration is pushing this grand conspiracy case, and there are no facts suggesting that people got together in a big plot to try to hurt Donald Trump."
This is not Schmitt's first encounter with national controversy. Last year he delivered a speech widely characterized as white nationalist, one in which he argued that America was not founded on a "proposition" but were instead “believed they were fighting for a nation, a homeland for themselves and their descendants."
He added, “They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us. America, in all its glory is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, it’s our heritage, our destiny. If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all.”
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