It was meant to be a dramatic confrontation, a public accusation of perjury against Jack Smith, the special counsel who investigated Donald J. Trump. Instead, Senator Eric Schmitt’s amateur sleuthing into basketball led him to the wrong game, league and state.
During a four-hour Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Mr. Schmitt, a Republican from Missouri, struck a conspiratorial tone and asked Mr. Smith if he had attended an Atlanta Hawks home game in February 2024.
Mr. Smith, testifying before lawmakers, appeared deeply confused by the question. “I definitely did not go to a Hawks game,” he said. “I’m sure of that.”
Mr. Schmitt seemed confident he had just caught Mr. Smith in a lie. It was part of a broader effort by Mr. Trump’s Republican allies to characterize Mr. Smith as politically partisan, a man with an ax to grind not just against a former president, but also the Republican establishment. Mr. Smith has already defended his work before Congress, and Republicans have claimed that his past testimony included perjury.
On Tuesday, Mr. Schmitt argued that Mr. Smith had lied again, this time about a basketball game. If the prosecutor was in Atlanta, Mr. Schmitt suggested, he might have met with the local district attorney, Fani Willis, who also pursued a criminal case against Mr. Trump.
Mr. Schmitt’s Republican colleague from Louisiana, John Kennedy, stood next to him helping hold up a poster board showing text messages among members of Mr. Smith’s special counsel team from Feb. 3, 2024, discussing seats at a basketball game.
“I don’t think you know we have this stuff, so I’ll give you a second to process it so you don’t perjure yourself,” Mr. Schmitt said, even as the poster board was swiftly taken down, too quickly for most in the room to read it.
When the former special counsel insisted he had not gone to see the Atlanta Hawks play in that time period, Mr. Schmitt declared, “I think you’ve already perjured yourself,” and called Mr. Smith a “dirtbag.”
The accusation appeared to unravel almost immediately.
Invited to respond by Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, Mr. Smith said he had, in fact, attended a basketball game on that day, but it was to see the Iowa Hawkeyes at the University of Maryland. That night, Caitlin Clark, the star point guard who now plays in the W.N.B.A., scored 38 points and had 12 assists.
Ms. Klobuchar suggested that Mr. Schmitt’s accusation was rooted in the senator’s confusion between the “Hawks” of Atlanta and the “Hawkeyes” of Iowa.
Mr. Schmitt declared that he still stood by calling Mr. Smith a “dirtbag,” then left the hearing.
The exchange took up just four minutes of the hearing. But it showed how eager the Republicans were to paint Mr. Smith as an out-of-control partisan — and to find a basis to accuse him of a crime at a time when the Justice Department has proved receptive to pursuing the people who investigated Mr. Trump.
A central issue was Mr. Smith’s subpoenas for lawmakers’ phone records as he and his team sought to trace Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on Congress to block Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s Electoral College certification.
As part of that effort, investigators also examined whether Mr. Trump had defrauded his supporters when he raised vast sums after the election promising to expose fraud that did not happen. They also subpoenaed financial records of Republican-aligned groups as they traced what actually happened to the money.
That effort did not result in charges.
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and others argued that when Mr. Smith subpoenaed phone records of Republican lawmakers, and sought court orders keeping those subpoenas secret, he showed that his prosecutorial ambitions extended far beyond Mr. Trump.
“Is it a crime to be a Republican?” Mr. Cruz asked angrily. “Absolutely not,” replied Mr. Smith.
Senator Darline Graham, the sister of Senator Lindsey Graham, who died in July, also confronted Mr. Smith over a subpoena of her brother’s phone records. Like Mr. Cruz, she focused on how an application for nondisclosure order to the phone companies raised the risk that if the subpoena became public, a target could destroy evidence or intimidate witnesses.
“Do you really believe that Lindsey was going to destroy evidence that was not even in his possession?” she asked.
“No, I believe your brother was a patriotic public servant. He was not a target of our investigation, and in fact he likely would have been a witness in our case” against Mr. Trump, Mr. Smith replied.
He told both Mr. Cruz and Ms. Graham that his team sought the records to investigate the conduct of Mr. Trump, not the lawmakers. The concern was not whether the lawmakers would destroy evidence or intimidate witnesses, but whether Mr. Trump or his associates would seek to do so.
Democrats countered Republican accusations by pointing to the evidence Mr. Smith gathered against Mr. Trump, leading to indictments for his efforts to undo the results of the 2020 election, and for his handling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
Senator Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, said the G.O.P. anger directed at Mr. Smith and the F.B.I. was a smoke screen for facts they would rather not face — that the former president had engaged in wrongdoing, and that the witnesses against him in both cases were largely Republicans.
Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, called the hearing “a farce.” The Republicans attacking Mr. Smith, he added, “choose Trump over truth, corruption and crimes over the Constitution, and I’ve had enough of it.”
For his part, Mr. Smith maintained a measured, even meek, tone as lawmakers on the panel alternated between denouncing him as a pinnacle of his profession and a poster boy for improper conduct.
“If asked whether to prosecute a former president today, based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat,” he said, adding: “I will not be silenced by continued threats of prosecution from the president or others.”
In early 2022, the Justice Department opened two investigations involving Mr. Trump. One was into his campaign’s plan to create false slates of electors as a pretext to block Mr. Biden’s certification, and the other was into his hoarding of classified documents while out of office, and his obstruction of efforts to retrieve them.
In November 2022, after Mr. Trump announced he would run for president again, Mr. Smith, a former prosecutor of federal corruption and international war crimes, was tapped to take over the inquiries as a special counsel. The next year, Mr. Smith brought two indictments against Mr. Trump.
Mr. Smith insisted that he brought charges because Mr. Trump “engaged in criminal activity,” and not because of any political agenda to stop Mr. Trump’s resurgence, as the president’s Republican allies have asserted. Mr. Trump triumphed over the two federal cases by winning re-election in 2024, leading to Mr. Smith’s resignation.
Since leaving government, Mr. Smith has said that the Justice Department has been “corrupted” by Trump loyalists who have wrecked its credibility and sought to undermine the rule of law.
Attorney General Todd Blanche, in testimony to Congress in July, suggested the department would investigate Mr. Smith to determine if he had lied to Congress.
Much of Tuesday’s hearing covered familiar ground — including whether investigators’ effort to collect lawmakers’ call records violated the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause, as Republican lawmakers insisted.
That issue is contested. Everyone agrees members of Congress cannot be prosecuted or forced to testify about their legislative acts. But appeals courts have disagreed about whether it also creates a confidentiality shield, and no court has interpreted it as barring subpoenas to phone companies for call logs.
The Justice Department’s public integrity section signed off on the subpoenas, Mr. Smith said. But while he defended the investigation’s work as carefully following the law, Justice Department rules, and best practices for prosecutors, he did offer one regret for how he had done the job.
Mr. Smith noted that he had come from a generation of prosecutors who spoke almost exclusively in courtrooms, and not in public, even to defend the integrity of the work or the prosecution team.
Following that tradition proved costly in the cases against Mr. Trump, he said.
“I do agree that prosecutors in the future need to learn to be able to communicate to the outside world,” Mr. Smith said.
Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
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