Jack Smith’s Senate testimony scrutinized over Trump cases

Sen. Eric Schmitt called former special counsel Jack Smith “the villain” and a “total dirtbag” at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2026. “You’ve done so much damage,” the Missouri Republican said, according to The Hill. “You will go down as a total dirtbag.”

Sarah Longwell and Andrew Weissmann took up that hearing in a Bulwark YouTube discussion chaptered in part as “Jack Smith’s Hearing: The Biggest Tell” and “Fani Willis Atlanta Claim Falls Apart.” The channel’s description says the pair focused on the questions Republicans did not ask about the actual cases against Trump and on the Schmitt exchange that blew up.

The collapse came over a basketball game. Schmitt pressed Smith about attending an Atlanta Hawks game in February 2024, The Hill and Reuters reported, drawing on text messages and tying the claim to Fani Willis’s Atlanta prosecution of Trump. Smith said he recalled a women’s college game between the Iowa Hawkeyes and the University of Maryland, played in Maryland on Feb. 3, 2024. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., called on Schmitt to apologize for a perjury accusation built on “confusion about the name of a team,” Reuters reported.

The hearing, titled “Oversight of Jack Smith’s Abuse of Authority and the Targeting of Republicans and Related Matters,” ran four and a half hours. Smith obtained toll records—call logs—of a dozen Republican senators around Jan. 6, 2021, The Hill and Deseret News reported. His team also reviewed texts from 44 U.S. lawmakers as part of a review of White House aides’ material. “Those records corroborated evidence that we had that the president, President Donald Trump, and his co-conspirators were seeking to exploit the violence on Jan. 6 in furtherance of their criminal scheme,” Smith said, per The Hill. He described the logs as noncontent records used to map contacts and intent.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, whose phones were among those sought, told Smith he had “subpoenaed records associated with my phones, both personal and office, and you sought and obtained a court order to prevent me from knowing about it.” Cruz said Smith had been “conscripted as a foot soldier for the DNC” and that the episode helped reelect Trump because “the American people were disgusted at your willingness to abuse power in partisan ends.” Cruz added that Smith issued 197 subpoenas to 34 individuals and 163 businesses, seeking records on at least 430 Republican individuals and entities. “If you look at the list, there is one thing that is consistent. Every name on it is a Republican.” Smith replied that the subpoenas supported “a criminal investigation of one of the most serious crimes that’s ever happened in our nation’s history” and that he “had a duty to collect facts.” Cruz repeatedly interrupted as Smith tried to explain why senators were not told in advance.