On a February Saturday in 2024, State Farm Arena was doing what downtown Atlanta does best: filling up, lighting up, and hosting an NBA night.
Eric Schmitt, Jack Smith Spar Over Atlanta Hawks Game
The Hawks were home against the Golden State Warriors. The city that had already become the backdrop for one of the most closely watched election cases in the country was, that evening, just a basketball town.
Atlanta Was the Scene of the Crime That Never Happened
Two years later, that same Atlanta night walked into a Senate hearing room and nearly became a perjury case.
The Atlanta theory
Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., spent part of Tuesday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing trying to place former special counsel Jack Smith in Georgia on Feb. 3, 2024. The timing was the point. The day before, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and special prosecutor Nathan Wade had publicly addressed their relationship — a scandal that had already scrambled Atlanta’s Trump election-interference case. Schmitt’s suggestion was that Smith’s presence at a Hawks game would put him in the city at a politically charged moment, close enough to imply coordination.
Schmitt asked Smith whether he had gone to the Warriors-Hawks game in Atlanta. Smith said no. He said he did not recall being in Atlanta during his time as special counsel, except perhaps connecting through the airport. He said he had not met Willis.
Then came the trap.
Schmitt said he had text messages from Smith’s team placing him at a Warriors-Hawks game in Atlanta that night. A poster board went up, then quickly came down. Schmitt told Smith he would give him a second “so you don’t perjure yourself,” then declared that Smith already had. Later in the exchange he called Smith a “dirtbag.”
For a few minutes, Atlanta was the alleged meeting place of two prosecutions.
The city that wasn’t there
Atlanta’s role in the Trump cases is real. Fulton County’s indictment was filed here. The hearings, the recusal fights, the local politics — all of that happened in this city. State Farm Arena sits a short ride from the courthouse world that defined that chapter. It is easy to see why a senator looking for a Georgia connection would reach for a Hawks ticket stub.
The problem was the ticket.
Smith, after finally getting a look at the texts, said the game in his memory was not the Atlanta Hawks. It was the Iowa Hawkeyes. The date lined up. The sport lined up. The nickname was close enough to cause the wreck. The city did not. He recalled going to a University of Maryland women’s basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing, with the U.S. Marshals Service along. That game was in College Park, Maryland, not downtown Atlanta. Iowa beat Maryland 93-85. Clark scored 38 points with 12 assists in a sold-out XFINITY Center.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., made the correction in the room: people should have their facts straight before calling someone a dirtbag, and they should not get the teams wrong. The Hawks were in Atlanta. The Hawkeyes were in Maryland. Same calendar day. Different league, different mascot spelling, different state.
Why Atlanta still sits at the center
The mix-up only works as a story because Atlanta already occupies the map. Schmitt was not fishing in a random city. He was trying to stitch Smith’s federal work to Willis’s local case, and the Hawks — Atlanta’s NBA team, playing in Atlanta’s downtown arena — looked like the perfect cover story for a trip to Georgia. The texts apparently mentioned “Hawks.” Someone saw an arena graphic. The city filled itself in.
That is how Atlanta functions in national politics now: as both a real legal venue and a convenient stage. When Washington needs a Southern conspiracy, it often reaches for this city first. On Tuesday, the city was asked to play host to a meeting that the witness said never happened and that the calendar, once checked, put 600 miles away.
Smith denied the Atlanta trip. Schmitt claimed a bust. Smith, vexed, named the other birds. The Senate had its phenomenal moment. Atlanta kept the Hawks, and not the special counsel, on Feb. 3, 2024.