Former federal prosecutor Jack Smith, who led the Justice Department investigation into Donald Trump’s 2020 election interference and the purloining of classified documents, laughed off a GOP Senate Judiciary Committee trap, part of their years-long effort to deny the basic truth that what Smith was investigating was real: Trump did in fact plan and act to coordinate a coup.

Whatever soundbites the Republican majority had hoped to generate, the indisputably signature moment of the hearing was when Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt thought he’d gotten Smith dead to rights attending a basketball game in Atlanta right around the time that the Georgia prosecution of Trump was mired in controversy over alleged conflicts of interest by District Attorney Fani Willis, insinuating that the two may have met to discuss their prosecutorial efforts.

One problem: the texts that supposedly placed Smith at an Atlanta Hawks match referred to a game that wasn’t even in Georgia and wasn’t even a men’s pro game, but a women’s college game, with the Maryland Terrapins hosting the Iowa Hawkeyes in College Park, Md., something that the senator seems to have missed entirely.

It was a smoking gun, just not of the sort that Schmitt was intending; it was further evidence of the Senate GOP’s efforts to shield Trump and attack those who tried to hold him accountable by any means necessary.

While Schmitt’s idiotic antics (one wonders what a senator has such an large staff for if they cannot fact check the name of a basketball team) were the most humiliating moment, but don’t let that distract you from the fact that the whole thing was an embarrassment, to the senators involved and to our country.

Setting aside repulsive language deployed against Smith — included Schmitt calling him a “dirtbag” and Sen. John Kennedy saying that the former prosecutor made him want to “throw up in my mouth” — the hearing once more failed to produce anything substantive to exculpate Trump or cast doubt on Smith’s careful investigation, another in a long line of failed efforts by MAGA lackeys to run cover for a man who loudly and proudly agitated for the insurrection, in public and on recorded lines.

The hit dog hollers, as the expression goes, and Trump and his MAGA contingent have spent the better part of a decade hollering. No volume of innuendo or lies or mischaracterizations are going to change the well-documented, publicly understood fact that the president, aided by allies in Congress, attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and bring about an end to American democracy, the very legacy that they had been entrusted with protecting.

The more they croak about supposed weaponization of government against them — by which they’re referring to investigations by career professionals that, if anything, were not allowed to go far enough, thwarted by recalcitrant courts and the eventual reelection of the coup plotter — the more attention they draw to Trump’s very real weaponization of government, which has included efforts to investigate Smith and his team of prosecutors for doing their jobs.

It seems likely that they’ll only have this ability for a few more months, as the GOP stands to lose big in the midterm elections with one or possibly both chambers of Congress going to the Democrats.

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