A senior staffer for Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) sent a scathing and emotional email to the office of Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) on Monday night after Lee blamed the political left for the shooting of two Minnesota lawmakers and their spouses.
“It is important for your office to know how much additional pain you’ve caused on an unspeakably horrific weekend,” Ed Shelleby, Smith’s deputy chief of staff, wrote in the email, which was first reported by Semafor.
“Using the office of US Senator to post not just one but a series of jokes about an assassination—is that a successful day of work on Team Lee? Did you come into the office Monday and feel proud of the work you did over the weekend?”
State Rep. Melissa Hortman (D), a friend of Smith’s, was assassinated along with her husband by a gunman who also shot state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife over the weekend. The suspect, 57-year-old Vance Boelter, is said to have kept a list of at least 45 other lawmakers, including Smith.
Over the weekend, Lee posted or engaged with several tweets that blamed the shootings on the political left, remarks that have drawn outrage from his Democratic colleagues on the Hill.
Lee posted, “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,” along with a photo of the suspected shooter released by the FBI, showing a masked man at the door of a lawmaker’s house.
Lee followed up with another post of the masked man’s photo alongside a headshot of Vance Boelter, the 57-year-old suspect, with the text “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” an apparent reference to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D).
Right-wing accounts have widely speculated that Boelter was motivated by leftist ideology, although people close to him have said that he supported President Trump.
Boelter also has been linked to Walz because he had been appointed twice to a state economic panel by two Democratic governors, first Gov. Mark Dayton, and then Walz.
“You exploited the murder of a lifetime public servant and her husband to post some sick burns about Democrats,” Shelleby wrote to Lee’s office. “Did you see this as an excellent opportunity to get likes and retweet? Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?”
Lee’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. His office’s official Senate account condemned the violence on Sunday.
Smith briefly confronted Lee in a Senate hallway on Monday night about his tweets, which came from his personal account. She told reporters that she wanted Lee to hear directly from her “about how painful that was and how brutal that was to see that on what was just a horrible, brutal weekend.”
Smith said he was “hard for me to characterize exactly what he said. He didn’t say a lot, frankly,” but added that Lee “seemed a little surprised to be confronted.”
Smith’s office did not immediately return a request for comment about the interaction.
Prior to his conversation with Smith, Lee appeared to double down in a reply to a tweet by X owner Elon Musk.
“The far left is murderously violent,” Musk tweeted in response to a post that blamed the left for the shootings.
“Fact check: TRUE,” Lee replied to Musk’s tweet.
Amidst bipartisan calls from both state and federal lawmakers to turn down the temperature, Shelleby asked Lee’s office to “begin to see the people you work with in this building as colleagues and human beings.”
Hortman, Shelleby wrote, “was a force. And a human being. And I beg of you to exercise some restraint on social media as we continue to grieve.”
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