They Came With a Perjury Trap. They Mixed Up the Basketball Teams.

Jack Smith didn’t have to show up yesterday.

Let me say that again. He did not have to be there. He’s a private citizen. He’s already been threatened with prosecution by the same administration he investigated. He could have fought the subpoena. He could have lawyered up and stayed home. A lot of people in his position would have.

He showed up anyway. He sat in that chair for four hours. He told the truth. Under oath. In that building. In front of the people who have been lying about him for years.

That’s good trouble. That’s what standing your ground looks like.

And what did Republicans bring to meet him?

Basketball.

Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri stood up and accused Jack Smith of perjury. He said Smith had lied under oath about attending an Atlanta Hawks game in 2024. He was ready. He had his moment. He had his clip.

There was one problem. The game wasn’t an Atlanta Hawks game. It was an Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball game. Different team. Different sport. Different city. Different everything.

A United States senator tried to catch a former federal prosecutor in a perjury trap and couldn’t tell the Hawks from the Hawkeyes. And when this was pointed out, Schmitt said he made no mistake.

This is who these people are. This is what they’ve got.

I watched Jack Smith sit in that room and I felt something I haven’t felt in a while. I felt proud. Because I know what it costs to walk into that building and tell the truth when powerful people want you to shut up. I’ve done it. I testified before Congress about what I saw on January 6th while members of that same Congress tried to make me the story. I know what it feels like to sit in that chair while people who were on the wrong side of history look you in the eye and call you a liar.

Jack Smith looked back at every single one of them and didn’t move an inch.

He said he wouldn’t be silenced by threats of prosecution. He said his team proved beyond reasonable doubt that Donald Trump engaged in serious crimes. He said the strongest witnesses in his case, the people who were the difference between the rule of law holding and not, were Republicans.

He said that. In the Capitol. In their faces. Yesterday.

And Chuck Grassley, who has spent two years telling anyone who would listen that the investigation was politically motivated, sat there and accused Smith of partisanship. This is the same Chuck Grassley whose party voted against certifying a free and fair election. The same party that called the people who attacked us “hostages” and “patriots” and fought to pardon every single one of them. These people have the nerve to sit across from Jack Smith and lecture him about partisanship.

I’m done pretending this is a normal political disagreement. It is not. These are people who watched January 6th happen, some of them helped make it happen, and they have spent five years trying to rewrite it. They pardoned the people who beat my colleagues. They shut down the investigations. They dismissed the cases. They threatened the prosecutors. And when the last person willing to tell the truth showed up and sat down in that chair, the best they could do was accuse him of lying about a basketball game and get the teams wrong.

Jack Smith said something in that hearing I’ve been sitting with. He said he wishes he had spoken up more. He came from a school of prosecution where you let the work speak. You stay quiet. You don’t respond to attacks. You trust the record.

He said that was a mistake.

“There are things being put out daily that are patently untrue, and you know they’re untrue,” he said. “People can unfairly malign your team and your case in a way that you really can’t respond to.”

He’s right. I learned that too. Silence gives liars room to fill. And these liars have been filling that room for five years.

The pardons happened. The dismissed cases are real. The DOJ that is now running interference for Trump instead of investigating him is real. Nothing yesterday undoes any of that.

But Jack Smith showed up anyway. He told the truth anyway. On the record. Under oath. In that building.

I was in that building on January 6th. I held the line that day so that building could keep working. Yesterday Jack Smith walked back in and did his part.

That’s the kind of American hero we don’t make enough noise about. Not the ones who do the easy thing. The ones who show up when it’s hard, when there’s nothing left to win, when the people across the table are lying to your face, and they tell the truth anyway.

Subscribe to Standing Our Ground. This fight isn’t over and I’m not going anywhere.

-Harry