INTERVIEW: "This isn't 2020": Sen. Eric Schmitt on riots, lawfare, and baseball
THE LOWDOWN:
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.) caught up with the Washington Reporter about the anti-U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protests rocking Los Angeles, the lawfare against President Donald Trump, and the Republicans’ demolition of the Democrats at the annual Congressional Baseball Game.
Schmitt said that, while Kim Gardner was the St. Louis prosecutor in 2020, his office “didn’t have original jurisdiction to file charges” and that his office “had to ask to come in to do Kim Gardner’s job because she wouldn't let us come in.”
Schmitt blasted the Democrats’ claims that speech is violent, pointing out that the COVID pandemic “was a revealing exercise in that the masks were off, figuratively.”
As for the Congressional Baseball Game for charity — where Republicans destroyed the Democrats for the fifth year in a row — Schmitt, a star player whose walkout song was Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass,” kept it humble when asked by the Reporter’s Matthew Foldi about comparing him to NFL legend Tom Brady.
Missouri’s former top cop has taken up residence in the Senate, and his expertise dealing with the violent 2020 George Floyd riots is front and center amid the chaos in the City of Fallen Angels.
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R., Mo.) spoke with the Washington Reporter about the anti-U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protests rocking Los Angeles, the lawfare against President Donald Trump, and the lessons he’s learned from the annual Congressional Baseball Game.
Schmitt said that, while Kim Gardner was the St. Louis prosecutor in 2020, his office “didn’t have original jurisdiction to file charges” and that his office “had to ask to come in to do Kim Gardner’s job because she wouldn't let us come in.”
“We certainly thought the public pressure was important for us to actually enforce the law,” Schmitt said. “What we found, though, was that at a local level — which is why the Soros network is so destructive — there's only one person who can make a charging decision, and it's the prosecutor.”
“And God knows the world needs social workers, but you can have somebody who isn't interested in prosecuting violent crime as the chief prosecutor, and you saw this play out in Philadelphia and LA and San Francisco and St Louis, and it's really destructive,” he continued. “And I think part of the reason why is because there’s an almost Marxist view of demoralization.”
“People sit back and they see things on fire and they don't understand why somebody's not doing something,” Schmitt said. “I think that's why it's really important that President Trump’s doing what he's doing right now, which is to send a very important signal that we're just not going to tolerate this. The National Guard is there to help.”
On the subject of political violence on the left and the nongovernment organizations (NGOs) — like the Party for Socialism and Liberation — fueling it are receiving, Schmitt said his subcommittee is already putting in work to get to the bottom of the issue.
“I chair the Subcommittee on the Constitution, and we have already had one hearing on NGOs as it relates to free speech, which focused on the efforts that NGOs have been contracted out to do, to suppress speech in this country, and that is critical to focus on,” Schmitt said. “It's very important for us to continue to look under the hood of the role that NGOs are playing now, not just with mass migration, but what you see with violence in the streets.”
“I do think that we need to be part of this. The challenge is that some people don't even know what NGOs are, and they exist in the guise of names like the ‘Institute for Peace’ or all this bullshit. I think we need to be much more aggressive in exposing what their purpose is. These are Marxist organizations. They're globalists who don't believe in borders. They don't believe in the sovereignty of the United States. They think that anybody from anywhere should be able to get here whenever they want, and they should never have to leave.”
“And we ought to confront that in a serious way,” Schmitt added.
Schmitt blasted the Democrats’ claims that speech is violent, pointing out that the COVID pandemic “was a revealing exercise in that the masks were off, figuratively.”
“It exposed the worst tendencies of the left, and I think there are a lot of lessons learned. The truth is the mantra of silence is violence or that speech is violence masks really what they want, which is to silence you, so they use language as a weapon,” Schmitt said. “‘You can't say this word. You have to say this word,’ and I think we have to be unapologetic about busting through that all the time and say what we believe.”
“Call it for what it is, and we found that once the mob doesn’t think they can be effective anymore, they move on to something else,” Schmitt noted. “I think we ought to call out the hypocrisy. We ought to be unapologetic in calling this stuff for what it is.”
“Just like they call for a global Intifada, it is about chaos. It's about anarchy. It's about resisting laws and rules and borders. They believe in this sort of crazy ass global revolution. And I think as Americans, we believe in a country, we believe in our law and we should enforce it. This is the time where law and order should reign supreme. This is why the American people, despite all the odds and all the pundits and all the lawfare and all the attempts to put Trump in jail, elected President Trump. They're tired of the bullshit.”
As for the Congressional Baseball Game for charity — where Republicans destroyed the Democrats for the fifth year in a row — Schmitt, a star player whose walkout song would be Kid Rock’s “American Bad Ass,” kept it humble when asked by the Reporter’s Matthew Foldi about comparing him to NFL legend Tom Brady.
“I appreciate the guy. He is the GOAT, right? He's the greatest of all time. So it's hard to argue with that,” Schmitt said. “But I'm just a guy out there who had dreams of playing for the St. Louis Cardinals. The Congressional Baseball Game is as close as I'm ever gonna get.”
As for the lessons Schmitt could draw from the game for his day job, Schmitt said that last year “obviously was a thumping” by the GOP.
“Our strategy is that we just gotta go out there and play the defense and wait for your pitch, and there's a lesson for Democrats,” he said. “I think you don't swing at every pitch. Politically, they're swinging at every pitch.”
Below is a transcript of the Washington Reporter’s interview with Sen. Eric Schmitt, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
You were Missouri’s Attorney General during Ferguson. What lessons did you learn from that?
Sen. Eric Schmitt:
Well, we had Kim Gardner in 2020, who was a Soros prosecutor in St. Louis. In Missouri, everything's a little different. We didn't have original jurisdiction to file charges. We had to ask to come in to do Kim Gardner’s job because she wouldn't let us come in. We certainly thought the public pressure was important for us to actually enforce the law. What we found, though, was that at a local level — which is why the Soros network is so destructive — there's only one person who can make a charging decision, and it's the prosecutor. And God knows the world needs social workers, but you can have somebody who isn't interested in prosecuting violent crime as the chief prosecutor, and you saw this play out in Philadelphia and LA and San Francisco and St Louis, and it's really destructive. And I think part of the reason why is because there’s an almost Marxist view of demoralization. People sit back and they see things on fire and they don't understand why somebody's not doing something. I think that's why it's really important that President Trump’s doing what he's doing right now, which is to sending a very important signal that we're just not going to tolerate this. The National Guard is there to help. Another thing I did, which people may or may not remember this, is that there was a mob of Black Lives Matter people walk through a private street, and the McCloskeys came out and they were holding guns, and instead of prosecuting people who were burning down buildings, Kim Gardner decided to prosecute them, and we took an unprecedented move of filing a brief to dismiss the case, because I thought it was important for people to know that somebody was going to stand up for him, that the idea that she would prosecute someone for exercising their constitutional rights to defend property and not be prosecuting looters, looters and rioters, was insane, and so we tried to provide a counterbalance at that time. And I think that kind of leadership matters. So I suppose that would be kind of a lesson learned; a lot of people at the time didn’t want to take her on because she was a black female prosecutor. They were afraid of being called all kinds of names, but that's exactly the time when we need to stand up, and regardless of whether it's a white prosecutor, black prosecutor, whoever it is, we have to stand up and say, ‘this is wrong, and this is what should be happening.’ I think again, President Trump is sort of taking that on, and I'm glad. This isn't 2020. More people have seen this movie and they’re tired of this bullshit. Whether you want to call it the silent majority or the common sense Americans or flyover country, whatever. People had enough of this. And so it's a temper tantrum from a group of people who were hell bent on open borders in this country. They got 15 million people here illegally. President Trump ran on mass deportations, and that's exactly what he’s going to do. We need more deportations. We need more ICE and they have to learn a lesson that what they try to do those four years just isn't gonna work.
Washington Reporter:
One of the refrains of the left is that this is the first time that the president overruled a sitting governor's request to not send in the National Guard since the Civil Rights era when, of course, a Republican president was forcing Democrats to open up schools for black children. Do you think that the situation that you were laying out justifies the unprecedented nature?
Sen. Eric Schmitt:
I do. The truth of the matter is, ultimately, at some point, there has to be some adult in the room that doesn't tolerate lawlessness. And the problem in a state like California is that the local mayor isn't going to do that. Gavin Newsom isn't going to do that. Gavin Newsom is in a trick box here, because he's been doing this ‘I'm a cool bro podcast guy’ for a little bit, trying to distance himself from some of the things that went wrong in 2024 with Kamala Harris and he was kind of stealthily positioning himself as an alternative in case they had had a real primary when Biden was out. That didn't happen. So he's been trying to distance himself from the craziness by saying ‘look at me. I'm a smooth operator who can talk the talk and talk with conservatives on podcasts.’ This is his problem now — he could have a Sista Soulja moment that Bill Clinton had in 92, but he doesn't have the guts to do it. He could be the guy standing up and saying, ‘we're going to put a stop to this. I’m California's governor. There's no place for this in our state.’ But they're so captured by the left that he understands intuitively now that in order to win that nomination in 2028 that he has to go to the left, because that's where the energy is. It's where the money is, and that's why they're stuck, and that's why I don't think they've hit rock bottom. I still think they're going to have electoral defeats in 2028 because they haven't fixed the underlying problem, which is their base now is pro-Hamas, pro-open borders, pro-censorship, pro-chaos, and you're seeing it play out. Now, he doesn't have the guts to stand up to them. So if all that happens, you don't have a local or state official willing to restore order, it’s important to have a president who wants to go do that, and it will be tested in the courts, but I think ultimately, President Trump's gonna be vindicated.
Washington Reporter:
I'm sure you get asked this all the time, but look at the other coast, and at another Democrat, John Fetterman. He's tweeting things right now that look like they could come from Senator Eric Schmidt. Do you feel like there's any chance that the far left will finally push him to a breaking point and he’ll switch parties?
Sen. Eric Schmitt:
I've got a good relationship with John. I don't know about that. Look, he's from Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania just elected Dave McCormick. President Trump won Pennsylvania. When I was campaigning with him and with JD, there was a lot of time spent in Pennsylvania. It’s kind of crazy that when John says something that's kind of common sense like that, it's viewed as being some kind of outlier. I mean this sincerely, I actually really can't believe that this is where the Democrats are. They just did this whole self-examination after 2024 and they're spending millions of dollars to figure out how they can reach young men after they've been telling men for a decade that ‘you're the reason why everything's terrible, and explain your privilege’ and all this craziness. So they haven't really fixed that. And then the hill to die on is you is deporting criminal illegal aliens. It's just amazing, but that's what happens when you don’t have a leader. It wasn't that long ago where even Barack Obama talked about border security and deporting people. Some of these floor speeches in the next couple of days aren't going to have Democrats saying anything like that. They're too afraid.
Washington Reporter:
One of the logics of Gavin Newsom and Karen Bass is that by showing up, ICE actually inflamed these tensions and escalated things. How would that logic fly in a courtroom when you were Attorney General?
Sen. Eric Schmitt:
It kind of reminds me of going back to when I was Attorney General. I prosecuted a murder case in the city of St. Louis. And this was actually in January of 2020, before all hell broke loose with COVID and everything else, and President Trump was in office, so we really focused on taking on violent crime. And so I thought it was important to have somebody who stood out there and got a conviction and said ‘everybody deserves to feel safe in their neighborhoods.’ One of the most amazing insights that I saw was there were two police officers who rolled up in a pretty rough neighborhood at three in the morning in St. Louis, and there's clearly a drug transaction happening. There’s a group of people. The crowd dispersed. This guy's in the car. They see a gun. They pull him out of the car. There's an officer involved shooting. The guy who was trying to kill the cops was killed. The prosecutor the next morning's comment was ‘I don't know what the cops were doing there at 3am.’ Just think of the message that that sends. It sends a message to cops, ‘I'm not going to have your back. I'm the prosecutor. I can come after you as a law enforcement official versus people who are terrorizing neighborhoods.’ It's a terrible message to send. I think this is analogous in that what she's really saying is we don't want anyone to enforce immigration laws. And if that's the case, what is the point of having laws in the first place, if they're never enforced? That was, by the way, when we were arguing about the stupid border bill a year and a half ago, and Democrats were trying to bamboozle us under the guise of more Ukraine money. It was like, ‘oh, we just need to do this, and then all of a sudden, we'll solve the immigration issue and the border problem.’ What I said at the time, which is why we rejected it, was we didn't need any new laws. We just needed a new president. And the point is we need someone to enforce the laws. And so now you have record low border crossings because they understand Trump will enforce border laws. I think it's very important that we stand our ground here and make sure that the ICE agents are able to do their jobs, and if they feel threatened, or they feel like bricks are going to be thrown at them off of overpasses, which is what's happening, they know that they are supported. That is exactly what the mayor of Los Angeles should be condemning, as opposed to saying that law enforcement efforts inflamed. It’s an upside down Orwellian dystopian nightmare.
Washington Reporter:
The FBI said they want to look into the funding of how all of these people are showing up in Los Angeles; we see the Party for Socialism and Liberation as one of these groups. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna was saying that Neville Singham, who funds Code Pink, is backing some of these. From the Senate standpoint, what can you do to look into these organizations?
Sen. Eric Schmitt:
It's a great question. I chair the Subcommittee on the Constitution, and we have already had one hearing on NGOs as it relates to free speech, which focused on the efforts that NGOs have been contracted out to do, to suppress speech in this country, and that is critical to focus on. It's very important for us to continue to look under the hood of the role that NGOs are playing now, not just with mass migration, but what you see with violence in the streets. I do think that we need to be part of this. The challenge is that some people don't even know what NGOs are, and they exist in the guise of names like the ‘Institute for Peace’ or all this bullshit. I think we need to be much more aggressive in exposing what their purpose is. These are Marxist organizations. They're globalists who don't believe in borders. They don't believe in the sovereignty of the United States. They think that anybody from anywhere should be able to get here whenever they want, and they should never have to leave. And we ought to confront that in a serious way. It's a cultural issue, it's a legal issue. It's also insulting to the people who I represent back in Missouri who work their asses off to put food on the table and send their kids to school, to know that their tax dollars are going to fund this crazy ass cultural Marxism experiment that the left has been able to put forward with our money. I thought it was really smart for DOGE to, right out of the gate, look at USAID funding, and we need to do more of that. I think that's the kind of stuff that drives people totally insane. And we all get to the bottom of who and what organization is leaving a pallet of bricks for rioters at night. Who's doing that?
Washington Reporter:
Do you think any momentum for a ban on face coverings at protests?
Sen. Eric Schmitt:
I think it probably says more about the protester than anything else. And my feeling is, you combat speech you don't like with more speech. I think exposing what it is maybe more important. For me, I'm a big free speech guy. I don’t have any problem with people having an opinion I really disagree with. The problem is that there is a playbook now for how this plays out. It's under the guise of this thing during the daytime, and then as soon as it becomes nighttime, things can get violent. We saw this in 2020 with the Black Lives Matter movement, which is a discredited organization and a total front for for Marxism and communism. They would get allies to come out during the day, and in the night, you knew exactly what was going to happen. And so they know the playbook. They're going to try to exploit it again and again until they believe they can't get away with it anymore, they're going to keep doing it. That's the reason why the National Guard is out there to protect property owners. I saw a video tweeted out of this poor mom with two her two kids, babies in the backseat, getting caught up in that. People are trying to get to work or trying to get home from work, or they're trying to visit a family member. Nobody deserves to go through all that and it's just sickening that there are hardly any Democrats, save for John Fetterman that I've seen who are willing to condemn any of this stuff.
Washington Reporter:
The left, for years, has said that speech is violence. Well, violence is violence, and whether it's assassination attempts on Trump, Israeli embassy staff getting murdered a couple blocks from where we're sitting, or Jews being fire bombed in Colorado, I think there's a clear problem with political violence, mostly coming from the left. How do we get to a point where that's no longer the case?
Sen. Eric Schmitt:
I think that we have to understand what we're dealing with. COVID was a revealing exercise in that the masks were off, figuratively. It exposed the worst tendencies of the left, and I think there are a lot of lessons learned. The truth is the mantra of silence is violence or that speech is violence masks really what they want, which is to silence you, so they use language as a weapon. ‘You can't say this word. You have to say this word,’ and I think we have to be unapologetic about busting through that all the time and say what we believe. Call it for what it is, and we found that once the mob doesn’t think they can be effective anymore, they move on to something else. I think we ought to call out the hypocrisy. We ought to be unapologetic in calling this stuff for what it is. Just like they call for a global Intifada, it is about chaos. It's about anarchy. It's about resisting laws and rules and borders. They believe in this sort of crazy ass global revolution. And I think as Americans, we believe in a country, we believe in our law and we should enforce it. This is the time where law and order should reign supreme. This is why the American people, despite all the odds and all the pundits and all the lawfare and all the attempts to put Trump in jail, elected President Trump. They're tired of the bullshit.
Washington Reporter:
You’re a star player for the GOP in the Congressional Baseball Game; is it an insult to compare you to Tom Brady since you’re from Missouri?
Sen. Eric Schmitt:
I appreciate the guy. He is the GOAT, right? He's the greatest of all time. So it's hard to argue with that. But I'm just a guy out there who had dreams of playing for the St. Louis Cardinals. The Congressional Baseball Game is as close as I'm ever gonna get.
Washington Reporter:
What lessons can you draw from this game for your day job?
Sen. Eric Schmitt:
Last year obviously was a thumping by us. Our strategy is that we just gotta go out there and play the defense and wait for your pitch, and there's a lesson for Democrats. I think you don't swing at every pitch. Politically, they're swinging at every pitch.
Washington Reporter:
Finally, what is your at-bat song?
Sen. Eric Schmitt:
Kid Rock’s American Bad Ass.
