MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace had nothing but scorn for the latest effort by Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) to play off his nationally-televised humiliation while interrogating former special counsel Jack Smith this week.
Schmitt proclaimed to have caught Smith perjuring himself by getting him to deny he was at an Atlanta Hawks game — when in reality Smith had been at an Iowa Hawkeyes away game in Maryland, and Democrats on the committee exposed this just after Schmitt attempted to drop the mic. Despite this, Wallace noted that when a TMZ reporter caught up with Schmitt, he tried to play it like everything worked out the way he had planned.
"I asked him if he was in Atlanta. He said no. He said it was another game. That's his answer," Schmitt told the reporter. When asked how the mistake happened, he said, "It was not a mistake ... I asked questions, and we'll see if he answers truthfully."
Wallace burst out laughing at this clip.
"I'm just a question asker!" she said. "I don't care what the answer is. I never have a preconceived notion of how you're going to answer it, or the political gotcha game I'm playing. I'm just a seeker of information! It's the most ridiculous answer I have heard him give on the third day of one of the greatest political debacles of the era. If you believe that, there are like a million bridges we can sell you."
Perhaps the best part, said Wallace, is that Schmitt "could have avoided becoming a national laughingstock and a butt of jokes, if his team had done a basic fact-check that they were pointed to as a horse led to water."
According to new MS NOW reporting, she continued, "other Republicans ... wanted nothing to do with the text that Schmitt so proudly had produced and mocked up with graphics and pictures and plastered on poster board" because, they warned him, the info was "unvetted and that it was their responsibility to verify the information."