A top Senate aide sent Mike Lee’s office a scathing email condemning the Utah senator’s heartless response to the assassination of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband over the weekend.
State Rep. Melissa Hortman, 55, and her husband Mark, 58, were shot and killed early Saturday at their home in Brooklyn Park by a gunman posing as a police officer. The suspect, 57-year-old Vance Boelter, is also accused of shooting Democratic state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife on Saturday.
The Utah senator captioned a surveillance photo of the gunman wearing a latex face mask, “This is what happens… When Marxists don’t get their way.”
He also shared another post of Boelter with the caption, “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” apparently in an attempt at a tasteless play on words involving Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz.
This is what happensWhen Marxists don’t get their way pic.twitter.com/VcZ0XtMiBA
— Mike Lee (@BasedMikeLee) June 15, 2025
Hortman was a longtime friend of Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith, who saw the state representative just hours before her death, Smith’s deputy chief of staff Ed Shelleby wrote in his email to Lee’s office. He and many of the people in Smith’s office knew Hortman, “So you’ll forgive my candor as I speak through enormous grief,” Shelleby added.
Blasting Lee’s posts as “unconscionable” as well as very likely “untrue,” the email recapped the weekend’s traumatic events.
“And the decision of the office of Senator Mike Lee was not to publicly condemn the violence or to express condolences to [Hortman’s] shattered children—it was to intimate that Melissa and Mark somehow deserved this? By making jokes?” he wrote. “Did you have any consideration for the survivors in her family? For the Hoffmans in the hospital? For their families?”
The email accused Lee of exploiting the murders 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? Have you absolutely no conscience? No decency?” Shelleby wrote.
It also pointed out that Boelter—a conservative Christian and supporter of President Donald Trump—allegedly left behind a hit list of Democratic lawmakers that included Lee’s Senate colleagues from Minnesota. Shelleby wrote that he prayed Lee and his office would “begin to see the people you work with in this building as colleagues and human beings.”
“Why would you use the awesome power of a United States Senate Office to compound people’s grief? Is this how your team measures success?” he asked. “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? Did you come into the office Monday and feel proud of the work you did over the weekend?”
Shelleby’s boss Smith also confronted Lee directly over the posts with the goal of explaining to him how much pain they had caused, the senator told CNN. Lee should take them down and apologize, Smith added, but so far, he hasn’t agreed to.
“He said, you know, how many times have we heard the words that go something like, ‘I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings’ or ‘I’m sorry if you didn’t understand what I…’” she said in an interview with Kaitlan Collins. “That’s not, in my mind, taking responsibility for your actions.”
Video posted by NBC News shows Lee fleeing and refusing to answer questions when a reporter tried to ask him whether he regretted the posts.
Sen. Mike Lee refuses to answer Qs regarding his controversial post in the wake of the MN shootings or his conversation with Sen. Tina Smith over the post. His aide attempted to shield our cameras as we questioned him. pic.twitter.com/y5HTiwe0aQ
— Brennan Leach (@brennanleach) June 16, 2025
“I suggest you take a few minutes today to read about Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark,” Shelleby’s email said, sharing a link to a story about the couple in the Twin Cities Pioneer Press.
“They were remarkable people… She was a force. And a human being,” Shelleby wrote. “I beg of you to exercise some restraint on social media as we continue to grieve.”
The post Mike Lee Gets Furious Senate Email Over His Deranged Assassination Post appeared first on The Daily Beast.
