After spending last week tussling with Jack Smith over a failed perjury trap that made him the target of widespread mockery, U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) now faces queries from the Federal Election Commission

(Missouri Independent)

One week ago, U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) became a national punchline when he tried to lure former Special Counsel Jack Smith into a perjury trap that wound up exploding in Schmitt's arrogant mug. Today, he could be facing bigger problems than that.

Schmitt is one of at least five Missouri Republicans who might have irregularities in their campaign finance reports. One of the others is fellow U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO).

According to an article at The Missouri Independent, the reports contain a host of bizarre numbers that are tied to donors you would not expect to draw attention to themselves. The story comes under the following headline: "FEC questions thousands of donations to Eric Schmitt tied to prolific online donors." The story also includes a subhead that refers to Schmitt and reads "Thirteeen donors flagged in federal letters appear nearly 5,700 times in the Missouri senator's reports, highlighting questions about recurring online contributions."

Deputy Editor Rudi Keller, author of the article, says it likely is a sign of problems that can arise with  increasingly automated online political fundraising. Keller begins his story by focusing on a donor that you would expect to start out in low-key fashion and remain that way:

In December 2023, a woman living in a small community near Austin, Texas, made a $78.08 contribution through WinRed. A few weeks later, she made another.

Then came four more contributions in January 2024.

Those were the first six entries under her name in Federal Election Commission (FEC) records stretching back decades. Since then, her name has appeared 126,739 times — including 1,011 times in reports filed by U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri.

And she is one of 13 donors with numerous contributions flagged in three letters the FEC sent this year to Schmitt’s campaign committee asking about donations that appear to exceed federal limits and other issues with his reports.

Keller notes a number of oddities in the FEC letters, including the locations of the donors and the number of donations they made. Keller writes:

None of the 13 donors flagged in the FEC letters live in Missouri, and none gave to Schmitt when he sought election to his first term in the Senate in 2022. He has raised $4.3 million since the start of 2025 for the 2028 election.

Those 13 donors are, collectively, listed in Schmitt’s FEC reports almost 5,700 times, donating $85,672 after accounting for negative amounts entered for each donor in subsequent and amended reports. The totals for each donor range from just over the donation limit of $3,500 to more than $10,500.

The Independent unsuccessfully attempted to contact the donors to understand why their names had been listed so many times.

The records offer a window into the increasingly automated world of online political fundraising, where a small number of donors can generate thousands of transactions, and campaigns must keep track of whether those contributions exceed federal limits.

Online fundraising platforms can process recurring contributions automatically, and a single donation can generate multiple entries in federal records as money moves through a platform, a political committee,  and a candidate campaign. That can leave regulators sorting out whether unusual patterns reflect legitimate giving, reporting errors, or contributions a donor may not have intended to continue.

Keller points out that this is not a new problem in the Show-Me State. In fact, the 2026 docket for the Missouri Legislature included an effort to straighten out a messy picture. It remains unclear if legislators  succeeded. It does seem clear, however, that the Schmitt campaign is not anxious to address questions about the FEC queries. Keller writes:

The issue is familiar in Missouri. Lawmakers this year tightened state campaign finance rules after The Independent reported that a 92-year-old Nebraska veteran had become an unwitting recurring donor to former state Sen. Bill Eigel’s campaign for St. Charles County executive. State and local candidates now must obtain clear consent for recurring contributions, send a receipt after every donation, and stop them when asked or after the election. No such restrictions exist at the federal level.

Schmitt’s campaign did not respond to a request for comments on the FEC letters.

The first FEC letter raising concerns about Schmitt’s fundraising listed 10 contributors with at least 20 donations during 2025. The second, sent after Schmitt’s campaign filed its report for the first quarter of the year, included inquiries about seven donors, six of whom were also listed in the first letter. 

The third letter, sent after the report for the second quarter of the year, listed 10 donors, including eight listed in one or more of the previous letters.

Does it look like any person or entity has violated federal election law? So far, the answer appears to be no. But the muddled picture might not get any clearer for a while, Keller writes:

The FEC letters do not establish that Schmitt’s campaign or any donor violated federal law. They are requests from commission staff seeking corrections or explanations for apparent problems in campaign finance reports.

“It does not mean there’s been a violation of the law,” Bradley Smith, a former chairman of the FEC, told The Independent. “It does not mean there’s going to be a fine on the campaign. It’s simply saying you’ve got reporting problems, and we’d like to either have this corrected or explained.”

The letters raise other issues as well, including incomplete information about some donors, donors who made single or a handful of donations that exceed the limits, and information about the source of donations passed through a conduit to the campaign.

Given the hyper-partisan nature of today's political environment, a reasonable observer might ask: "Is something nefarious going on behind the scenes? Are these people being targeted for some improper purpose?" That might lead to questions about Bradley Smith's background. But Keller provides a look at Smith's biography, and it portrays a man who seems to be a fair-minded fellow, with a history of working  on bipartisan projects. Keller writes:

Smith was a Republican member of the FEC from 2000 to 2005 and was appointed chairman by President George W. Bush. After leaving the commission, Smith founded the Center for Competitive Politics, now the Institute for Free Speech, and his academic work was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision allowing corporations to spend directly in political campaigns.

The practices of both parties’ online fundraising efforts need to be investigated, Smith said.

“My sort of vague sense,” Smith said, “is that the FEC has probably not done enough to either investigate these items or ask campaigns to install certain safeguards to make sure that you don’t end up with people sending multiple contributions.”

What about the Missouri Republicans, besides Schmitt, who might receive scrutiny from the FEC? Keller provides background on them:

Schmitt is not alone in receiving recurring campaign donations. And four other Republicans from Missouri — U.S. Rep. Eric Burlison of Springfield, U.S. Reps. Jason Smith of Salem and Ann Wagner of St. Louis County, as well as U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley — have received numerous contributions from some of the same donors listed on the letters to Schmitt.

How has the Schmitt campaign responded to queries from the FEC? So far, it seems to be making a good-faith effort to stay on top of the matter, Keller writes:

Federal-candidate campaigns are allowed to accept donations of up to $3,500 from individuals for each election. A campaign can collect that amount for the primary election and again for the general election and can accept funds for the general election before the primary is held.

The letters said Schmitt’s campaign had the option of redesignating excessive amounts for the primary to the general, splitting the donations from joint banking accounts between the individuals on the account, refunding the money or, when the donor could not be reached, turning it over to the U.S. Treasury.

“Although the commission may take further legal action concerning the acceptance of excessive contributions, your prompt action to refund, redesignate, and/or reattribute the excessive amount will be taken into consideration,” the first letter stated.

In response to the first letter, Janna Rutland, Schmitt’s campaign treasurer, wrote that an amended report was filed addressing the issues. 

“After filing the original report, the committee discovered that a software error caused donor information to be mismatched, which resulted in reporting errors,” Rutland wrote.

The amended report included “any necessary reattributions, redesignations, or refunds,” Rutland wrote.

Rutland has submitted similar letters responding to the FEC’s other letters. 

With JD Vance leading the way, White House actually shows interest in reviving Watergate, apparently in an attempt to equate Donald Trump with Richard Nixon

(Hillary Clinton's post, Facebook)

Late last week, Americans were hit with a headline that seemed like something writer and comedian Andy Borowitz might have made up. Borowitz, who shares much of his work at Facebook, plus his independent newsletter "The Borowitz Report" at Substack, has become one of the most insightful political observers of this lawless and dysfunctional age. In fact, it seems the more 'out there" Donald J. Trump and his allies  become, the funnier Borowitz gets. That's a good thing because I suspect many anti-Trumpers, including yours truly, could use a daily dose of belly laughs to head off "Trump Derangement Syndrome," known clinically as TDS.

As for the headline in question, I'm not sure even Borowitz could have dreamed it up. Get a load of this from a jointly published report at MS NOW and Yahoo! News: "Decades later, Trump DOJ to review whether Nixon was mistreated during Watergate. Taken literally, those words suggest the Trump Department of Justice has nothing better to do than to reopen a criminal case that launched almost 55 years ago (June 17, 1972) and became such a cultural phenomenon that a book on the subject, All the President's Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, is widely considered a masterpiece of investigative journalism, earning a spot among TIME magazine's 100 best nonfiction books of all time (list published in 2011.) A film version of the book, starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, won four Academy Awards and is seen by more than a few critics and viewers as one of the great movies of all time. To top it off, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for its reporting, helping to make the term "Watergate" a catchphrase any time a political scandal hits the news.

What does the Trump administration hope to accomplish by resurrecting Watergate? Most Trump insiders probably can't answer that question, so it's got to be a struggle for any sane person to take on.  But Steve Benen gives it a shot with his original piece at MS NOW. Let's take a look:

It's outrageous enough that Donald Trump's Justice Department has targeted the prosecutors who investigated the scandal-plagued Republican president. Though it seems hard to believe, it adds insult to injury to learn that the hyperpoliticized DOJ is also taking a fresh look at the prosecutors who investigated a different scandal-plagued Republican president.

The Wall Street Journal reported:

The department is reviewing whether the special prosecutor's office that investigated the famed Watergate break-in committed misconduct, according to people familiar with the matter, more than half a century after that scandal led to Nixon's resignation.

Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon aide turned Watergate historian and revisionist, recently gave a two-hour presentation at Justice Department headquarters that laid out his theory that the deep state took Nixon down. The title of his 78-page slide deck: "Watergate As Lawfare."

Let's note a few problems with the thesis that Shepard is pitching: 

(1) Watergate as Lawfare --  "Lawfare is defined as "the misuse of legal systems, courts, and laws . . . to harm, weaken, or delegitimize an adversary." In other words, Shepard claims Watergate was an illegitimate criminal case brought to weaken Richard Nixon. To borrow one of Donald Trump's favorite terms, Shepard wants us to believe that Watergate was a "hoax."

(2) How do knowledgeable critics and mainstream historians view Shepard's claims? They aren't buying it, and this is not new material from Shepard:

Shepard has for years advanced a revisionist account of the prosecution, using internal documents he says show Nixon and his associates were treated unfairly.

His claims differ from the prevailing historical account, which holds that Watergate was a constitutional crisis driven by abuses of presidential power. Nixon resigned in 1974 as impeachment proceedings advanced.

Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and former Nixon Presidential Library director, has rejected efforts to portray Nixon primarily as a victim, calling evidence of abuses of presidential power "overwhelming" and pointing to White House tapes showing Nixon discussing efforts to obstruct investigations.

The review comes as President Donald Trump and some of his allies have drawn parallels between Nixon's experience and investigations into Trump. 

(3) Even the National Review isn't buying it -- As the leading conservative magazine in the U.S., the National Review might be expected to side with the Trump administration and and Nixon revisionists on this one. But it does not; Andrew C. McCarthy writes:

What I want to say in this post is that I am an admirer of Geoff Shepard, the Nixon administration official who reportedly made the big presentation to the Trump Justice Department. Geoff is a great lawyer who worked on Nixon’s defense of the special prosecutor(s)’ investigation, and I recommend his book, The Nixon Conspiracy: Watergate and the Plot to Remove the President (Bombardier Books, 2021). He makes a compelling case that the investigation of Nixon was abusive.

I’m not surprised that this theory has gotten a warm reception in the Trump administration, which makes the same fallacious contention made by Nixon’s more ardent apologists: The probe was patently politicized; ergo, he was innocent. As with Trump, Democrats politicized the Nixon probe, yet he was still guilty, at least of impeachable offenses. 

Let's return to Steve Benen's article at MS NOW for insight on how Shepard's pro-Nixon propaganda found an ear with the Trump DOJ:

According to The Journal's article, it was just last month when a senior Justice Department official invited Shepard to come to Main Justice and make his case before the Office of Professional Responsibility. A Justice Department spokesperson confirmed on the record that this actually happened. 

"The review is preliminary," The Journal said, "and it isn't clear whether it will lead to a full-fledged probe."

If this sounds at all familiar, it's because Team Trump has been focused on Nixon and Watergate quite a bit lately.

Just a few months ago, for example, Ed Martin, before he stepped down as the highly controversial U.S. pardon attorney, published a bizarre item to social media, arguing that the Watergate scandal was a "hoax" orchestrated in part by the CIA. (Gee, those words sound like they came straight from Trump's demented brain.)

Martin added, "The only thing worse than the lying CIA is the two-faced liar John Dean [who served as Nixon's White House counsel] and the fiction-writer [Bob] Woodward. May they suffer in eternity."

The idea that Richard Nixon was the victims of a CIA-driven hoax seems to be taking hold in Republican circles. That should not be a surprise, given that no one in the postmodern GOP seems capable of independent thought. Benen notes that it did not take long for some prominent Republicans to state that Martin had a worthwhile point:

The Republican activist's claims were ridiculous, but hours later they were nevertheless endorsed by Monica Crowley, a former Fox News personality who currently serves as the Trump administration's chief of protocol. "President Nixon was the target of a Deep State hoax," Crowley wrote online while referencing Martin's tweet. "He will be vindicated." 

Days later, JD Vance appeared at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in California, where the vice president kept the rhetorical campaign going.

After arguing that Nixon's legacy is "enjoying a bit of a renaissance," the Ohio Republican said, "As I joked … backstage, if Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be, like, a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy."

Most folks who have been paying attention to current events likely know that JD Vance's words on most any topic should be viewed with a massive dose of skepticism. True to form, it did not take Vance long to go "there," equating Nixon's experience in Watergate with Trump's treatment at the hands of the supposedly evil Biden administration. Benen writes:

As part of the same comments, Vance argued in apparent seriousness, "If you look at the story of how the deep state took down Richard Nixon, it's not all that different from what the same groups of people, the same institutions, tried to do to Donald Trump in the first Trump administration."

There were all kinds of problems with Vance's pitch, including the simple fact that it's bonkers to think Nixon was brought down by nefarious government insiders who plotted against him. We have, after all, heard the tapes. Nixon chose to engage in systemic abuses. His crimes were his own, not the fault of "the deep state," whether Republicans choose to acknowledge reality or not.

Experts who actually have studied Wategate seem to be listening to Vance's words with mouths agape, Benen reports:

Historian and journalist Garrett Graff, who wrote one of the defining books about Watergate, described Vance's comments as "shockingly" ahistorical and an "immature understanding of what Watergate was and wasn't."

Timothy Naftali, the former director of the Nixon Library, told The Washington Post soon after that Vance "should know better as a well-educated lawyer."

Naftali, a presidential historian at Columbia University, went on to refer to recordings that contain thousands of hours of Nixon's Oval Office conversations.

"You can hear him suborn perjury on the tapes. He's telling an intermediary what to tell someone who's about to be interviewed by the FBI, what to say and what not to say," the historian explained. "You can hear Nixon being told that money had been found to hire Teamsters to go and break the bones of demonstrators. That's all illegal." 

"It's not as if it's a matter of partisan interpretation. The evidence is overwhelming," Naftali concluded during his interview with The Post while offering additional examples of Nixon's efforts to subvert legal protections.

Three months later, Trump's Justice Department is nevertheless prepared to take a fresh look at whether Nixon was some kind of victim of prosecutorial abuse — developments that would've seemed unthinkable a half-century ago. 

Eric Schmitt was warned that evidence he intended to introduce in his perjury trap for Jack Smith had not been vetted; Schmitt used it anyway, and now he might pay a political price

Eric Schmitt's perjury gaffe draws press attention (ABC4 News)

The blowback keeps piling up for U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-MO) after his attempt to set a perjury trap for former Special Counsel Jack Smith blew up spectacularly at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday. The latest self-induced headache for Schmitt comes from a report that evidence he cited had not been vetted, and the senator knew that in advance. The latest comes from a jointly published piece at Daily Beast and Yahoo! News under the headline "MAGA senator hit with fresh humiliation after new bombshell." The report hinted that a Schmitt staffer might face fallout from the fiasco. William Vaillancourt writes:

The Republican senator who flubbed a gotcha moment while questioning former Special Counsel Jack Smith knew the evidence he cited had not been vetted, a new report claims.

Eric Schmitt was warned in advance that the series of text messages he proudly displayed at Tuesday's hearing were not properly vetted, a source familiar with the matter tells MS NOW.

As former attorney general of Missouri, Schmitt should know how to build a case, especially one he hoped would result in a perjury charge against Smith. So why did Schmitt haul off at the hearing with the legal equivalent of toilet paper stuck to his shoe? I can only think of 2-3 answers to that question. One is that Schmitt simply might not be too smart. Two is that Schmitt has become such an ardent Trumper that it clouded his judgment and caused him to become reckless. Three is that Schmitt desperately wants to gain a position in the Trump administration and was willing to do most anything to impress his would-be boss. Considering that Trump's poll numbers are flat lining, and the economy is cratering, it's hard to see why anyone would want to join the Trump White House. Has the Senate become that bad a gig?

Law students usually take a trial advocacy course in their second or third year of law school, and I suspect the primary lesson goes something like this: "Success in the courtroom depends on sound and thorough preparation." Eric Schmitt must have skipped class that day. Villaincourt writes:

Schmitt tried to corner Smith by asking whether he attended an Atlanta Hawks basketball game, a roundabout way of suggesting he was colluding with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who was investigating President Donald Trump's election interference in Georgia.

Smith, Schmitt claimed, committed perjury when he said he did not go to a Hawks game in February 2024. Smith answered that he had actually been at an Iowa Hawkeyes women's basketball game instead—creating a viral moment that continues to embarrass Schmitt.

The Daily Beast/Yahoo! report provides background on how Schmitt came to wander into a proverbial cowpile:

The mishap originated when the Justice Department shared the texts with GOP staff on the Judiciary Committee, according to MS NOW. Chairman Chuck Grassley's staff omitted the texts from a memo about information to be used in the hearing. Grassley did not share the messages with his Democratic colleagues, either.

Schmitt's staff, the report claims, searched for information that might show a connection between Willis' investigation and Smith's. They were then given the texts, but with a warning that they had not been vetted. Schmitt's staff was reportedly told they would need to complete the necessary vetting.

They apparently did not.

A fact-check would have revealed that the seat number mentioned in the texts sent between Smith's staff does not exist in the Hawks' home arena. Smith also appears in the crowd in videos of the Hawkeyes game in Maryland. 

Before his error, Schmitt was floated as a potential running mate for JD Vance in 2028, and was described as "trustworthy, intelligent, articulate and a deft political operator." After the error, Schmitt seems to be none of those things.

As for the aforementioned Schmitt staffer, he also seems to have cow poopy on his shoe. Villaincourt writes:

The MAGA senator's disastrous line of questioning may also reap consequences for a member of his staff.

Prior to Tuesday, the staffer on Schmitt's team who held up the giant poster of the texts, Ethan Harper, was on track to leave his role as general counsel and join the White House in the Staff Secretary's office. However, the episode has added some doubt to that transition, Politico reports. The extent of Harper's behind-the-scenes involvement wasn't immediately clear.