GOP Senator Knowingly Used Unvetted Info to Try to Trap Jack Smith

And it went about as well for Senator Eric Schmitt as you might expect.

Republican Senator Eric Schmitt was warned that his attempt to trap former special counsel Jack Smith might be baseless—before he humiliated himself on the Senate floor anyway.

Republican staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee warned Schmitt that the text messages he was planning to use to accuse Smith of holding secret meetings in Atlanta were “unvetted,” MS NOW reported Wednesday.

Schmitt accused Jack Smith during a hearing Tuesday of sneaking to Atlanta to meet with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and prosecutor Nathan Wade, after they revealed their affair in February 2024. The Missouri Republican claimed to possess text messages proving that Smith had plans to attend an Atlanta Hawks game, but unfortunately for Schmitt, the texts were actually about Smith’s plans to attend a University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball game in Maryland.

The Department of Justice shared materials with GOP staff on the Judiciary Committee ahead of the meeting, sources told MS NOW. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley’s team compiled most of the important information into a memo, but did not include the supposedly damning texts in their assessment, one source told the outlet.

Grassley did not share the texts with Democratic senators ahead of the hearing, deepening the suspicion that Schmitt’s failed “gotcha” moment was secretly engineered by the Trump administration, one source told MS NOW.

Democrats aren’t the only ones suspicious of the source of Schmitt’s viral face plant.

A senior Republican senator also believes the Trump administration was working to nail the president’s longtime foe. “I’m pretty sure the White House asked him to do it,” they told RawStory. “And, probably, the White House provided the material.”

Schmitt’s blunder would probably be another blip in the news cycle, except that it came just hours after Axios reported that the Missouri Republican was gaining “buzz” as a potential running mate for JD Vance in 2028. Clearly, somebody thought Schmitt was about to make waves, but he only made himself a laughingstock.

Pennsylvania Nears 1,000 Measles Cases as RFK Jr. Remains Silent

The state has reported its fifth measles-related death.

An unvaccinated resident of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was confirmed to have died from measles, according to an announcement by the state Health Department Wednesday.

The death marks the fifth measles-associated death in the Keystone State this year, per state statistics. At least 943 measles cases have been reported within the state so far.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were, comparatively, far behind in recording national figures related to measles: As of Tuesday, the CDC reported just two measles deaths in the entire country.

That discrepancy has sparked a fierce debate between Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the health agency’s decision not to rely on state data but instead to use mortality figures from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Reuters Tuesday that the incongruous statistics could undermine public confidence and even lend ammunition to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine followers who would argue that the deaths were “invented or inflated.”

“To the public, that gap........

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