Dem senator confronts Mike Lee over his ‘cruel' response to Minnesota lawmaker shootings

Yahoo

4 hours ago

Nearly three years ago, a man violently attacked then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband in the Democrat's Bay Area home. Paul Pelosi was nearly killed in the assault, but that didn't stop a variety of Republican voices — including members of Congress — from taking turns downplaying, mocking and trading in disinformation about the violence, even as he lay in a hospital bed.
Donald Trump's reaction was especially ugly, as the then-former president embraced a bonkers conspiracy theory about the attack, which he continued to joke about as recently as last fall.
The reaction among too many Republicans to the brutality Paul Pelosi faced was a crushing reminder about the state of the party's moral compass. The related reaction from some in the party to the lawmaker shootings in Minnesota over the weekend brought these same concerns to the fore.
Though he was hardly alone, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah responded to the slayings in an especially ugly way, even suggesting that the alleged gunman — a right-wing Trump voter, according to a close friend of the suspect — was a 'Marxist.' The GOP senator even pinned his tweet to the top of his social media feed for special emphasis.
It wasn't the first time Lee amplified garbage from his party's fever swamps, but given the circumstances — mocking and lying about the bloodshed just one day after the shootings, while the hunt for the suspect was still underway — many of the senator's critics believed he'd crossed a line.
And one of his colleagues was especially eager to let him know about it. NBC News reported:
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. ... '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.
The Minnesota Democrat, who personally knew the victims, 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 added.
It would've been so easy for the far-right Utahn to get this right. He could've said nothing over the weekend. Alternatively, Lee could've denounced politically motivated violence and extended his sympathies to the victims, their loved ones and the affected communities.
But Lee made a choice — more than once — to embrace cheap and ugly lies, rubbing salt on open wounds, with no apparent goal in mind other than performative cruelty, seemingly indifferent to the fact that some of his fellow members of the Senate were included on the suspected killer's apparent target list.
An NBC News reporter caught up with the Republican senator on Capitol Hill on Monday, giving him an opportunity to explain himself and say whether or not he stood by his online garbage. He ignored the questions.
Perhaps Lee would've been better off showing similar reticence on Sunday.
In an email to Lee's office after Smith confronted her colleague, a top aide to the Minnesota Democrat condemned the Republican for using the 'awesome power of a United States Senate Office to compound people's grief' and for 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 on to accuse Lee and his office of having 'exploited the murder of a lifetime public servant and her husband to post some sick burns about Democrats. Did you see this as an excellent opportunity to get likes and retweet[s]? Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?'
'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.
As of this writing, the cruel lies that Lee published to his social media account have not been taken down.
UPDATE (June 17, 2025, 1:19 p.m. ET): Shortly after this piece was published, the offensive tweets were removed from the senator's X feed.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com