Washington-La Senator Tina Smith, D-minn, said Monday that she faced Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah for her publications on social networks about the suspect in shootings who took the life of a minnesota legislator and her husband.
Smith said she faced Lee after her “cruel” publications on Sunday, in which he included a photo of the alleged gunman and wrote: “This is what happens when the Marxists do not go out with their own.”
“I wanted him to know how much pain that other people already caused me in my state and I think that throughout the country, they think this was a brutal attack,” Smith told journalists in the Capitol.
He added that Lee needed to hear from her “directly” and think about the “impact that their actions had.”
“I don’t know if Senator Lee completely thought about what he was, you would have to ask him, but he needed to have news of me directly what an impact that his cruel statement had in me, his colleague,” said Smith.
An armed man fatally shot the state Democratic representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, and wounded the state -owned Democratic Senator John Hoffman and her wife Yvette Hoffman on Saturday morning. Vance Boelter, the suspect wanted in the shootings, was arrested Sunday night.
The authorities have described Hortman’s murder as a “politically motivated murder.” The main federal prosecutor in Minnesota told reporters that The notebooks found in the Boelter car included the names of more than 45 names of federal and state officials. Several Democratic members of Congress have said that their names were on the list.
Lee’s positions also caused the condemnation of other Democrats, including the leader of the Senate minority, Chuck Schumer, Dn.y., and Senator Amy Klobuchar, D-minn.
When NBC News asked him about Smith’s confrontation with him, Lee refused to respond, and an assistant tried to protect him from the cameras when he left the Capitol.
In an email to the Lee office after the confrontation, a superior Smith assistant criticized the Utah senator and his staff for using the “incredible power of a United States Senate office to aggravate the pain of the people” and cause “additional pain … in an indescribably horrible weekend.”
“Is this as your team measures success? Does using the US senator’s office to publish not only one but a series of jokes about a murder, is that a successful day of work in the Lee team?” Ed Shelleby wrote in the email shared with NBC News by the Smith office.
Shelleby went to recapitulate Saturday’s events, accusing Lee and his office of having “exploited the murder of a public servant for life and her husband to publish some sick burns about the Democrats.”
“I pray to God so that none of you will go through this. I pray for the senator to read and his office begin to see the people with whom you work in this building as colleagues and human beings. And I pray so that if God does not want it, they are ever found that you have to deal with anything similar, they are at the end of the grace and compassion that Senator Mike Lee could not reflect, Shelleby added.
