WASHINGTON — Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., said Monday that she confronted Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah over his social media posts about the suspect in shootings that killed a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband.
Smith said she confronted Lee after his “cruel” posts Sunday, in which he included a photo of the suspect and wrote, “this is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way.”
“I wanted him to know how much pain that caused me and the other people in my state and I think around the country, who think that this was a brutal attack,” Smith told reporters in the Capitol.
She added that Lee needed to hear from her “directly” and think about the “impact his actions had.”
“I don’t know whether Sen. Lee thought fully through what it was, you’d have to ask him, but I needed him to hear from me directly what impact I think his cruel statement had on me, his colleague,” Smith said.
A gunman fatally shot state Democratic Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and injured Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, early Saturday. Vance Boelter, the suspect, was arrested Sunday night.
Authorities have described the killing of Hortman as a “politically motivated assassination.” The top federal prosecutor in Minnesota told reporters that notebooks found in Boelter’s car included more than 45 federal and state elected officials’ names. Several Democratic members of Congress have said their names were on the list.
Lee’s posts sparked condemnation from other Democrats, as well, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.
Asked by NBC News about the confrontation with Smith, Lee declined to answer, and an aide tried to shield him from cameras as he left the Capitol.
In an email to Lee’s office after the confrontation, a top Smith aide blasted him and his staff for using the “awesome power of a United States Senate Office to compound people’s grief” and of causing “additional pain … on an unspeakably horrific weekend.”
“Is this how your team measures success? 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?” Ed Shelleby, Smith’s deputy chief of staff, wrote in the email, which the senator’s office shared with NBC News.
Shelleby went onto recap Saturday’s events, accusing Lee and his office of having “exploited the murder of a lifetime public servant and her husband to post some sick burns about Democrats.”
“I pray to God that none of you ever go through anything like this. I pray that Senator Lee and your office begin to see the people you work with in this building as colleagues and human beings. And I pray that if God forbid, you ever find yourselves having to deal with anything similar, you find yourselves on the receiving end of the kind of grace and compassion that Senator Mike Lee could not muster,” Shelleby added.
