Scarcely 24 hours after a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota was assassinated in her home, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, posted a pair of politically charged messages mocking the attack.
“This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way,” Mr. Lee wrote on Sunday on his personal X account, a message accompanied by photographs of the suspect released by law enforcement officials.
An hour later, in a second post showing the suspect, Mr. Lee wrote: “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” in an apparent reference the Democratic governor of the state, Tim Walz.
By the afternoon, amid outraged responses to his postings, Mr. Lee issued a very different message on his official Senate account in which he hit all of the sober notes one would expect from an elected official reacting to a political assassination.
“These hateful attacks have no place in Utah, Minnesota, or anywhere in America,” Mr. Lee wrote on X. “Please join me in condemning this senseless violence, and praying for the victims and their families.”
But that standard-issue statement came long after his initial derisive posts, in which he appeared to lay responsibility for the shooting at the feet of Democrats and the political left.
While the political affiliation of the suspect is not clear — he was listed in some recent state records as “other” or “no party preference” — people who know him have said he is a religious conservative who supports President Trump and is passionately opposed to abortion.
Mr. Lee, a onetime anti-Trump evangelist who now regularly shares conspiracy theories online and has become a MAGA influencer, was at first unapologetic in the face of a firestorm of criticism for his early posts on the matter. He briefly pinned one of them to the top of his account.
“Grow the hell up,” Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee, wrote online in response. Dan Pfeiffer, the former Obama aide turned star podcaster, condemned it as “truly disgusting behavior from a United States Senator.”
At least one Democratic lawmaker said she planned to confront Mr. Lee in person about the posts when senators return to Capitol Hill for votes.
“I have condemned what Mike Lee did here at home, and I will speak to him about this when I return,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, said on MSNBC over the weekend. “And what I’m going to tell him is: This isn’t funny.”
Ms. Klobuchar was close friends with Melissa Hortman, the assassinated state representative.
Representative Derrick Van Orden, Republican of Wisconsin, also posted the expected condemnations of any political violence on his official account while simultaneously pointing to political motivations for the shooting elsewhere on the internet.
On his personal social media account, Mr. Van Orden claimed, with no evidence, that the shooter had targeted Ms. Hortman because she was not “far Left enough.” He also accused Mr. Walz of having “appointed the crazy zealot that murdered her to one of your boards” and called the governor a “clown.”
The suspect had served on a state economic board with one of the victims, State Senator John A. Hoffman, who survived the shooting, though it is unclear if they knew each other. He had been appointed to the panel, the Minnesota Governor’s Workforce Development Board, in 2016 by Gov. Mark Dayton, a Democrat, and was later reappointed by Mr. Walz.
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times. She writes features and profiles, with a recent focus on House Republican leadership.
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