logo
After a senator's posts about the Minnesota shootings, his incensed colleagues refused to let it go

After a senator's posts about the Minnesota shootings, his incensed colleagues refused to let it go

WASHINGTON (AP) — Mike Lee has in recent years become one of the Senate's most prolific social media posters, his presence seen in thousands of posts, often late at night, about politics. Fellow senators have grown accustomed to the Utah Republican's pugnacious online persona, mostly brushing it off in the name of collegiality.
That is, until this past week.
His posts, after the June 14 fatal shooting of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, incensed Lee's colleagues, particularly senators who were friends with the victims. It all added to the charged atmosphere in the Capitol as lawmakers once more confronted political violence in America.
As the Senate convened for the week, Sen. Tina Smith, D-Minn., marched past a crowd of reporters and headed toward the Senate floor: "I can't talk right now, I have to go find Sen. Lee."
Smith, whose name was listed in the suspected shooter's notebooks recovered by law enforcement officials, spoke to Lee for several minutes. The next day, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., did the same. By midday Tuesday, Lee had deleted his tweets.
'I would say he seemed surprised to be confronted,' Smith later told reporters.
The shooting unfolds
On the morning of June 14, Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., announced that former state House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, had been shot and killed in their home outside Minneapolis. Another Democratic lawmaker, state Sen. John Hoffman, and his wife, Yvette, were critically injured, in a shooting at their home nearby.
The next day, as police searched for the shooter, Lee posted a photo of the alleged shooter with the caption 'Nightmare on Waltz street" — an apparent misspelled attempt to shift blame toward Walz, who was his party's vice presidential nominee in 2024.
In a separate post on his personal account, @BasedMikeLee, the senator shared photos of the alleged suspect alongside the caption: 'this is what happens When Marxists don't get their way.'
On his official Senate social media account, Lee was 'condemning this senseless violence, and praying for the victims and their families.'
A spokesperson for Lee did not respond to a request for comment.
The man arrested, Vance Luther Boelter, 57, held deeply religious and politically conservative views. After moving to Minnesota about a decade ago, Boelter volunteered for a position on a state workforce development board, first appointed by then-Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, in 2016, and later by Walz.
Boelter has been charged with two counts of murder and two of attempted murder.
Lee's online posts draw bipartisan backlash
Once a critic of Donald Trump, Lee has since become one of the president's most loyal allies. Lee's online persona is well established, but this year it has become especially prominent: a Salt Lake Tribune analysis found that in the first three months of 2025, Lee averaged nearly 100 posts per day on X.
What was different this time was the backlash came not just from Democrats.
To Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., Lee's posts were 'insensitive, to say the least, inappropriate, for sure' and 'not even true.'
'I just think whenever you rush to a judgment like this, when your political instincts kick in during a tragedy, you probably should realign some priorities,' Cramer said.
Republican state Rep. Nolan West wrote on social media that his respect for Lee had been 'rescinded.'
A spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., did not respond to a request for comment.
Last Monday night, after Smith's confrontation with Lee, a senior member of her staff sent a pointed message to Lee's office.
'It is important for your office to know how much additional pain you've caused on an unspeakably horrific weekend,' wrote Ed Shelleby, Smith's deputy chief of staff. He added, 'I pray that Senator Lee and your office begin to see the people you work with in this building as colleagues and human beings.'
Lee avoided reporters for much of the week, though he did tell them he had deleted the posts after a 'quick' discussion with Klobuchar. Lee has not apologized publicly.
"We had a good discussion, and I'm very glad he took it down,' Klobuchar said at a news conference.
Tragedy prompts reflection in Congress
The uproar came at a tense time for the Senate, which fashions itself as a political institution that values decorum and respect.
Senators are under intense pressure to react to the Trump administration's fast-paced agenda and multiple global conflicts. Republicans are in high-stakes negotiations over the party's tax and spending cuts plan. Democrats are anxious about how to confront the administration, especially after federal agents briefly detained Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., at a recent Department of Homeland Security news conference in California.
Lawmakers believe it's time to lower the temperature.
'I don't know why Mike took the comments down, but it was the right thing to do,' said Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M. 'I appreciate my Republican colleagues who were very clear with their observations. And those that spoke up, I want to commend them."
He added: 'We just all have to talk to each other. And what I learned from this week is people need to lean on each other more, and just get to know each other more as well."

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Vance reference to Alex Padilla as ‘Jose' during LA presser sparks Dem backlash
Vance reference to Alex Padilla as ‘Jose' during LA presser sparks Dem backlash

Yahoo

time13 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Vance reference to Alex Padilla as ‘Jose' during LA presser sparks Dem backlash

Several California Democrats slammed Vice President Vance after he referred to Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) as 'Jose' during a Friday presser in Los Angeles. 'I was hoping Jose Padilla would be here to ask a question,' Vance said, referring to Padilla's forcible removal from a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press conference last week. 'I guess he decided not to show up because there wasn't a theater,' he continued. Democrats railed against Vance for misnaming the state's first Latino senator, who the vice president served alongside before his successful White House bid. 'Calling him 'Jose Padilla' is not an accident,' California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said in a Friday post on the social media platform X. Newsom also urged Vance, who spoke about the governor's response to unrest sparked by mass Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in the region, to make remarks to his face during a debate, instead of online or during public events in a later post. While Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) echoed the governor's concerns, she cited potential racial undertones in Vance's remarks. 'I guess he just looked like anybody to you, but he's not just anybody to us. He is our senator,' Bass said during a Friday presser. 'Mr. Vice President, how dare you disrespect Senator Alex Padilla like that? You serve with him in the Senate right now. You know him,' Bass wrote in a post on X, referring to the vice president's role as president of the upper chamber. However, Vance's spokesperson said the mix up was an innocent mistake. 'He must have mixed up two people who have broken the law,' Taylor Van Kirk, a spokesperson for Vance told reporters on Friday. But Padilla's colleagues aren't buying it. 'JD Vance served alongside Alex Padilla, and knows better. He's taking this cheap shot to distract from the real fear and havoc this Administration is creating,' Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote in a Friday post on X. 'It's pathetic.' The vice president's visit to Los Angeles came a day after a federal appeals ruled President Trump could retain control of the California National Guard in response to the protests. Both Bass and Newsom have encouraged the Trump administration to remove the National Guard and Marines from Los Angeles, arguing the city is safer without federal forces. Democratic lawmakers have continued to question the conditions detained illegal immigrants are being held under as well as law enforcement's use of physical force against protesters and members of Congress seeking to conduct oversight of immigration operations. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Ro Khanna: Democrats lost 2024 because they became the ‘party of war,' overlooked inflation
Ro Khanna: Democrats lost 2024 because they became the ‘party of war,' overlooked inflation

Yahoo

time13 minutes ago

  • Yahoo

Ro Khanna: Democrats lost 2024 because they became the ‘party of war,' overlooked inflation

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) blamed the Democratic Party's poor performance in the 2024 election on unpopular positions on foreign policy and ineffective messaging on inflation in an interview with POLITICO. Khanna said in an interview on 'The Conversation' with Dasha Burns that Democrats became 'the party of war' by standing with Israel amid the country's ongoing war in Gaza. 'I think the Gaza situation really hurt us with a lot of young people, certainly in Wisconsin and Michigan,' Khanna told POLITICO. 'We would have won those two states, but for that.' Khanna, who has represented the San Francisco Bay Area since 2017, also pointed to his party's failure to take decisive action on supply chain shortages and other causes of rising prices as a key factor in Democrats' failure to woo voters. 'We were too late in recognizing how much people were hurting,' Khanna said in the interview, which was taped Wednesday and is set to air in full on Sunday. 'We kept calling it transitory. We didn't have the urgency of a plan of what we were gonna do to tackle inflation.' Khanna also weighed in on Elon Musk's recent fallout with President Donald Trump and whether the Democratic Party should welcome the billionaire back into its fold. Khanna served in the Commerce Department for the Obama administration, and he said that administration helped Musk's SpaceX secure key federal contracts to compete with industry heavyweights like Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Musk also wrote a testimonial for Khanna's 2012 book 'Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing is Still Key to America's Future,' calling the future lawmaker 'a leading thinker on how to make U.S. manufacturing more competitive across this country.' But Khanna, who has known the former DOGE leader for over a decade, told Burns 'I don't recognize what happened to him,' condemning the Tesla CEO for politicizing the recent assassination of a prominent Democratic state lawmaker and her husband. 'The far left is murderously violent,' Musk wrote in a June 14 post on his social platform, X, reposting a commenter who erroneously claimed that the left was responsible for the Minnesota shooting and was a 'full blown domestic terrorist organization.' Khanna said Musk has 'done so much damage' — but credited him for criticizing the GOP's advocacy of stiff tariffs, harsh crackdown on international students and proposal to deepen the U.S. deficit by about $2.8 trillion over the next decade. 'My hope is just that he's not going to continue to enable an extreme agenda that hurts innovation, which is what the Trump administration has pursued,' Khanna said in the interview.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store