'Brutal and cruel': Minnesota senator confronts Mike Lee over assassination joke

After a longtime Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband were assassinated over the weekend — and another legislator and his wife were hospitalized after being attacked by the same shooter — Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) joked about it on social media. And one of his Senate colleagues from Minnesota took notice and recently confronted him.

57 year-old Vance Boelter is the primary suspect in the killings of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark on Saturday. Boelter is also allegedly responsible for the shooting of Democratic-Farmer-Labor (or DFL, which is the Minnesota equivalent of the Democratic Party) state senator John Hoffman and his wife on the same day, who both remain in critical condition. Investigators say he had a list of other DFL elected officials, including Sen. Tina Smith (DFL-Minn.) and former Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz. Boelter is accused of dressing as a police officer, in which he donned body armor and a "hyper-realistic mask" before allegedly carrying out the attacks.

In two tweets from his official X account, Lee wrote "this is what happens when Marxists don't get their way" and "nightmare on Waltz street." As of Monday evening, the tweets have not been taken down."

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On Monday, Multiple Capitol Hill reporters noticed that Smith pulled Lee out of a Senate Republican meeting to confront him over the posts. She told reporters "let me just gather myself" before eventually giving the details of the confrontation.

"I told him that I thought it was brutal and cruel. He should think about the implications of what he's saying and doing. It just further fuels this hatred and misinformation," she told CNN reporter Maju Raju.

"I wanted him to hear from me directly how painful that was and how brutal that was to see that on what was just a horribly brutal weekend," she continued. Smith went on to say that the Utah Republican "didn't say a lot," and that "frankly, I think he was a bit stunned."

"He certainly didn't promise to take it down or say anything publicly about it," she added. "He seemed kind of surprised to be confronted."

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