Sen. Mike Lee Deletes Minnesota Shooting Posts After Sen. Tina Smith Confronted Him

Republican Sen. Mike Lee on Tuesday deleted several social media posts about the killing of a lawmaker and her husband in Minnesota after outrage from Senate colleagues.

The decision to delete the posts came just a day after Lee was confronted by Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith, a Democrat who knew slain state Rep. Melissa Hortman personally. Smith was seen speaking animatedly to Lee in a Senate hallway during votes on Tuesday.

“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 following the confrontation with Lee on Tuesday. “I don’t know whether Senator Lee thought fully through what it was — you 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.”

Lee dodged reporters following the conversation, and did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NOTUS about what led up to his posts being deleted.

Lee was criticized by fellow lawmakers Sunday morning for a pair of posts on his X account, one of which associated Gov. Tim Walz with the weekend violence.

“This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,” Lee wrote alongside an image of alleged shooter Vance Boelter in tactical gear.

“Nightmare on Waltz Street,” he added in another post, seemingly misspelling Walz’s name.

Hortman, 55, was killed early Saturday morning alongside her husband, Mark, by a gunman authorities say was posing as a police officer. The suspect also allegedly shot and injured state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife — who are expected to recover from their injuries.

Ed Shelleby, Smith’s deputy chief of staff, sent a scathing email to Lee’s office referencing the senator’s social media posts. In it, Shelleby details the relationship between the deceased and Smith, and excoriates staff members for allowing such vitriol to be published under Lee’s name, according to a copy of the message published by The Salt Lake Tribune.

“I am not sure what compelled you or your boss to say any of those things, which, in addition to being unconscionable, also may very well be untrue,” Shelleby wrote in the email. “You exploited the murder of a lifetime public servant and her husband to post some sick burns about Democrats.”

Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, told reporters Tuesday that Lee’s comments were “insensitive.”

“He maybe should have waited longer before he responded. I don’t know where he stands today on it. I just know where I do ... the politics of this shooter are so irrelevant to me,” Cramer told reporters. “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, but I haven’t talked to Mike about it personally.”

Returning to Capitol Hill on Monday after the attacks, lawmakers struggled to cope with what appears to be an escalating pattern of violence.

“It is so unfortunate what happened in Minnesota, it raises this dark reality that we are all one vote away from losing our lives,” Rep. Norma Torres, a member of the House Administration Committee, which has oversight of member security, told NOTUS on Monday.

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Amelia Benavides-Colón is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.