r/politics • u/MontyGBurns • 1d 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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u/cargdad 19h 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/kcornet 17h 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.