MS NOW reporter Carol Leonnig was left stupefied after Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) torpedoed his entire line of questioning against former special counsel Jack Smith by mixing up which basketball team he went to see while trying to prove he was in Atlanta on a certain date.
"Deadline: White House" anchor Nicolle Wallace kicked off the discussion by calling Schmitt's move "a faceplant of epic proportions" and noting that the entire GOP move to invite Jack Smith for questioning was a tactical blunder from the start.
"So Jack Smith was called up there, and the Republicans control everything," said Wallace. "They could have pulled the plug. Right now, the pieces of Trump's agenda that are more unpopular than Trump are the economy and retribution ... it's actually one of the political deadweights to Trump, who is a political deadweight to his party."
What this means, she said, is that bringing up Smith to exact vengeance on him on live TV, even if it had gone well, "was a disastrous political decision."
Leonnig concurred with this assessment.
"I don't think they realized, Nicolle, how disastrous it was going to be," she said. "I don't think they would have done this today if they had realized how much they were going to step in their own muck and faceplant."
When Leonnig watched Schmitt's interrogation, she continued, "My jaw was kind of dropping because I've been covering a lot of presidential administrations ... I never saw a senator toss out so recklessly such flimsy facts to try to slime/undermine a person without realizing how badly that would make them look."
"Now, we joke ... that there's a staffer who's going to be out of a job by the end of the day," she added. "But the senator participated in this, making a claim that was demonstrably false. And it wasn't the only one, Nicolle."
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