Minnesota's two U.S. Senators, Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, are both railing against Utah's U.S. Senator Mike Lee after his "distasteful" tweets about the recent political assassination's in Minnesota.
Klobuchar tells MSNBC's Joe Scarborough that Lee's posts were "beyond disgusting. One post was captioned "Nightmare on Waltz Street" and another claimed, "This is what happens when Marxists don't get their way." Lee posted those to his personal X account, not his official Senate account. Lee is very active, often posting far-right content on his personal X account. Both posts have gone viral with "Waltz" a purposeful misspelling.
"This isn't funny, what happened here," says Klobuchar speaking about the deaths of Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman. "This was an incredible woman and her husband, her two kids on Fathers Day there was no Father's Day for them. They lost both their parents."
She added that she plans on personally addressing Lee when she returns to Washington emphasizing that the tragic events, are "not a laughing matter".
"I'll tell him about the law enforcement that did incredible work," says Klobuchar. "We had a 43 hour man hunt, the biggest manhunt in Minnesota's history. Twenty SWAT teams going door to door, citizens on edge hiding in their homes."
Already confronting Lee was Senator Smith who pulled Lee out of a conference room where Republicans were about to hold a meeting to discuss the text the Finance Committee had just unveiled for the party’s massive tax bill.
Smith emerged a minute later and spoke to Lee in the hallway. The two spoke for a couple of minutes. Smith was asked about it on CNN and said she needed him to know how hurtful it was to his colleagues.
“About how painful that was and how brutal that was to see that on what was just a horrible, brutal weekend," Smith said.
Leaving the Capitol in Monday, Lee was asked about it and avoided the questions.
Klobuchar says given the impact on the victims' families and the entire state the tweets were in poor taste.
"US Senator Mike Lee used his platform to inflict more pain on Minnesota," said Minnesota's Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy (St. Paul). "Our Velvet Hammer, Senator Tina Smith, called it out."