An NBA game 650 miles off: Eric Schmitt's Jack Smith exchange carries AP
A short clip from a Senate hearing drew more in ten hours than an Associated Press upload usually gathers in a full day, while the rest of the channel ran quieter than normal.
Associated PressStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 772,470 views a day, 39 times a normal first day on this channel (19,803).
WATCH: Eric Schmitt mistakes basketball teams while trying to trip up Jack Smith
Where was Jack Smith on the evening of February 3, 2024? That question sat at the center of a Senate hearing on Tuesday. Sen. Eric Schmitt, the Missouri Republican, kept pressing the former special counsel about whether he had been at an NBA game in Atlanta that night, when the hometown Hawks played the Golden State Warriors. Schmitt then accused Smith of perjuring himself.
According to the Associated Press's own description, the senator seemed to have mixed up basketball teams playing roughly 650 miles apart. The clip, titled "WATCH: Eric Schmitt mistakes basketball teams while trying to trip up Jack Smith," passed 455,000 views in its first ten hours. An AP upload usually draws fewer than 20,000 on its first day, so this one is running close to forty times that pace.
Smith is best known as the special counsel who led the two federal cases against Donald Trump, one over classified documents and one over the 2020 election. Schmitt was Missouri's attorney general before he joined the Senate.
The comment section is busy. Many viewers point to a poster board shown during the exchange, and several bring up a hallway interview after the session.
The clip stands well apart from the rest of the channel. AP's daily views overall are running below their usual level, and the other uploads from the same days, including a FlyDubai story told by President Trump, have stayed in the low tens of thousands.
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- Channel
- Associated Press
- Subscribers
- 4,670,000
- Channel views, pace per day
- 1,542,050 (on a normal day: 2,251,538)
- Video published
- September 30, 2026
- Video views so far
- 455,040 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 772,470
The numbers
The figures show one hearing clip far ahead of everything else on a channel that is quieter than usual overall.
💡 Test your knowledge
Before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, the Golden State Warriors played in which city?
The Warriors were founded in Philadelphia in 1946 and moved west in 1962.
