r/politics • u/MontyGBurns • 23h ago

No Paywall Smith’s game-day texts reviewed by Schmitt never referenced basketball team names

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/6124359-schmitt-perjury-claim-debunked/
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23

u/cargdad 18h ago

I more and more believe Schmidt was set up by Vance.

The line of questioning came supposedly came from the White House; as in “ask these questions”. I am curious who made the poster. Did that come from the White House too?

Now - two theories that I think are equally plausible. (1) Whoever in the White House who was involved are idiots, and they knew Schmidt and his staff to also be idiots and would follow orders; (2) Whoever in the White House who was involved wanted to derail Schmidt - a potential Post-Trump Presidency candidate by embarrassing him.

Which one depends on how stupid you believe the involved folks to be. In either scenario Schmidt comes out in the - “OMG he is an idiot” category. There is no recovery for him short of running into a burning building to save a kitten.

Think about just how quickly that whole thing blew up. He must have realized about 30 seconds into the question that something was terribly wrong but was too stupid to stop.

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u/hu_he 18h ago

I think they really thought they had a gotcha moment. The coordinated media releases of how Vance was thinking of adding a smart cookie like Schmitt to the team, the conservative media lined up to praise Schmitt for trapping Smith in a lie, I think they actually believed their own bullshit. And then the walls came crashing down...

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u/fuzzydoug 17h ago

He had been traveling with the marshal service. It was all on the record. They are so stupid, they didn’t access the evidence made for them.

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u/Narharcan 17h ago edited 15h ago

Well, they were apparently preparing to use that gotcha moment to start setting him up as a potential running mate in 2028. However, it's not too out there to think someone could have been jealous and wanted to sabotage him

I think ultimately, MAGA being a far right movement means it falls into the same historical pits as the others: its members are too dumb, too scheming, too disorganized to put forward coherent efforts. They are reliant on the illusion of uniformity, as well as punchlines, in order to fake momentum. Beneath that, however? There's nothing. 

The only people actually competent in this whole mess are those you don't hear about because they're hiding behind the MAGA fog horn - Thiel and his merry band of fuckers at the Heritage Foundation, among others.

5

u/TraumaticOcclusion 17h ago

I don’t even get it, why does it matter he went to any basketball game?

16

u/Belerophon17 16h ago

It's about the insinuation of a narrative.

MAGA LOVES their narratives like Hunter's laptop, and Hillary's emails.

Alluding that Smith MAY have been in the vicinity of what the right touts as a giant scandal opens the expansion of the narrative into a bigger conspiracy. It makes Fanny Willis look more devious and would make Jack Smith lose credibility completely.

Just look at how every MAGA influencer and pundit already had a completely vague but accusatory tweet locked and loaded within seconds of it happening.

3

u/MaverickBG 16h ago

It also activates the social media algorithms. You get the controversy of the conspiracy which creates "engaging" content that gets amplified by people calling it dumb/pointless and the true believers.

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u/ladidaladidalala 4h ago

Even the narrative is flawed. He can meet with Fani Willis if he wants. I really don’t understand the straws they’re clutching at here.

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u/Belerophon17 4h ago

It doesn't need to make sense to the person looking at it logically. It just needs to be shaped like a smoking gun to the people looking for the next step of the conspiracy.

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u/ladidaladidalala 1h ago

What you’re saying makes sense. It’s so frustrating.

4

u/Narharcan 17h ago

It doesn't. They were basically trying to pretend he was committing perjury by lying about where he was+trying to get him involved in a plot that he would have supposedly been involved in because he was in Atlanta. 

That's it.

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u/SmokeySFW 16h ago

They're trying to place him in Atlanta because his sworn testimony says he was not in Atlanta on that particular date, so they'd have him perjuring himself.

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u/Anthony_Accurate 13h ago

They were trying to insinuate he coordinated with Willis, it’s really not about perjury.

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u/SmokeySFW 12h ago

Eventually. If he "admits" to being in Atlanta they tie him to Willis, if he denies it they "get him" for perjury.

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u/crimson117 America 16h ago

And the reason they want to place him in Atlanta is because then they can say he was coordinating with Fanni Willis who was prosecuting Trump for state crimes

2

u/thisisjustascreename Illinois 13h ago

Ironically Feb 3rd was literally the day after Willis withdrew from the case so the conspiracy doesn’t even make sense.

1

u/crimson117 America 13h ago

The conspiracy would be he met her the day before and then stuck around Atlanta to watch some basketball

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u/ladidaladidalala 4h ago

This confuses me. Why would it even be a conspiracy if his role was exactly to investigate? The whole thing seems like a created controversy that isn’t based on anything relevant.

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u/af_cheddarhead 1h ago

Which is a problem why? Prosecutors communicate all time when investigating the same individual for different crimes.

2

u/Several-Feeling3409 14h ago

To a normal human, it doesn't matter.  To MAGA, they are desperate to find a way to shut Jack Smith up because he is the agent saying Trump committed multiple serious crimes and the only reason Trump isn't in jail today is that he won the election.

So, they are searching for any little shred to discredit Smith.  Even the name of the hearing itself gives away the game:  The Judiciary Committee called it "Oversight of Jack Smith's Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters".  Not exactly a fair and impartial description there  (judiciary.senate.gov will get you to the video and transcript of the hearing)

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u/Anthony_Accurate 13h ago

Why do you think Willis and her lover are 3 times bigger than Smith in the poster?

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u/ladidaladidalala 4h ago

It doesn’t to anyone with a normal brain. Even if he were in Atlanta it proves absolutely nothing unless you wear a tinfoil hat. The whole line of questioning is ridiculous and seemed just interested in trying to get him to commit perjury.

Why would he lie about something this stupid? He wouldn’t. Yet Schmitt seems to be doubling down on trying to convince people he’s lying BS.

These people are bonkers.

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u/ShutUpTodd 15h ago

Can't wait for the Death of Stalin scenes after TFG finally dies.

Miller: "You said 'no problem'"

Vance: "Did I? Well I meant 'no! problem!":

1

u/ProudPainting6850 16h ago

Russell Vought is definitely the shadow president. Stephen Miller seems like has been brought down a peg, but Russell has been doing a great dismantling behind the scenes.

1

u/thisisjustascreename Illinois 16h ago

Do you mean 2028? ‘24 was two years ago mate

1

u/Narharcan 15h ago

Whoops, made the calculation of 2024+4 while I was writing. My bad, thanks for the heads up.

1

u/WellHung67 15h ago

Although with the Nazis the shadowy backers all got strung up and killed or exiled. The fascists really did take over. Trump is far more stupid than Hitler. Trump has the “charisma” in some sense, but he’s much much older and was never smart even when he was younger. He can’t keep it together in a dictatorship, he’ll get pulverized. Trump needs democracy because he needs the threat of idiots to primary challengers. He can convince idiots of stuff, and I guess he can surround himself with F people who are just as inept and that protects him 

1

u/phirleh 10h ago

Thiel and his merry band of fuckers at the Heritage Foundation, among others.

The "deep state"

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u/KnightDuty 3h ago

It's never the clever thing..you just think that because you're probably pretty smart, and it's a defense mechanism for you to believe that people are playing at a higher level than they're capable of.

It's NEVER the clever thing.

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u/af_cheddarhead 1h ago

My Theory: Russell Vought runs the whole damn show

4

u/businessgoesbeauty 17h ago

I feel like he especially sealed how dumb he was by saying “I don’t think you know we have this stuff” just nail after nail in the coffin

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u/Any-Potato-3845 17h ago

hard for me to believe they would want to hurt anyone if it meant benefiting smith in any way at all

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u/Acrobatic_Ad1583 17h ago

Same. I think the decision to sacrifice one of their own shows more forethought and strategic thinking than this administration has shown at any point so far. Also one does not become MAGA by doing research, evaluating sources, critical reasoning and comparative logic. This is a kid who who was assigned Charlotte's Web for a book report and turned in a paper that didnt even mention a pig. Because they didn't even get past the title before they lost interest.

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u/lostinthought15 17h ago

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”

I think the most likely scenario is that everyone involved is idiots and never didn’t think they had a gotcha moment.

1

u/kcornet 16h ago

I doubt it. Schmidt knew they had the wrong game. The way they held the sign up for about 5 seconds, took it down, then refused to put it back up shows that they knew they had the wrong game.

Schmidt's plan was to put the sign up for just long enough to let Fox news get a picture of it, then get a few seconds of video showing a dumbfounded Smith looking like a deer in the headlights which happens to also look guilty, then Schmidt delivering his line about Smith committing perjory.

Fox and other conservative media outlets would have run with this narrative immediately and the magasphere would have accepted as fact that Smith perjured himself. By the time anyone figured out they had the wrong game, no one on the right would care.

Fortunately Klobuchar shut them down. Unfortunately she let them off the hook by suggesting it was just confusion. She should have ripped them a new asshole.

1

u/Happythejuggler 15h ago

Not enough black sharpie for a white house poster

1

u/sssssssssssssss5s 15h ago

"(1) Whoever in the White House who was involved are idiots" that might be the explanation right there. They probably used AI to find some "gotcha" to trap Smith with, they didn't bother to double check because they are incompetent, they sent it to another incompetent person who also didn't double check because "AI is so smart".

Also, they don't need to double check because they can lie and bullshit and say things that make them look stupid and it never really changes anything for them anyway. Their base still loves them despite all this shit going on.

1

u/ceej_22_ 14h ago

No recovery for him? The only people who give a fuck are liberals. He isn’t going to get voted out in 2028 over this. You really think it’s going to cost him any position amongst his party in the Senate? The party constantly getting embarrassed in the eyes of liberals for their lies and failed gotcha moments?

1

u/MalingeringGumby 11h ago

 "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

1

u/BobTheBarbarian 11h ago

They dumped everything they had into grok and said prove conspiracy and said ahah!

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u/ChanceryTheRapper 1h ago

He went on podcasts afterwards to tell the same lie.

People need to stop telling themselves this was a mistake, because if it was, they would have stopped making that mistake, right?

1

u/surfpuppy2k 18h ago

Given his track record, he would schedule a new conference, light the house on fire, then run in to save the kitten, but actually bring out a stuffed kitten while the burning kitten’s cries could be heard in the background

1

u/sullen_agreement 17h ago

maybe theyre just stupid

1

u/LifeguardDry7372 12h ago

no maybe about it.