Sen. Klobuchar Slams Sen. Mike Lee’s Social Media Posts About Minn. Shooting Suspect

SCARBOROUGH: “Well, one politician, and I will say a man that I’ve known and in the past have had a good relationship and liked him, like a soft-spoken man, but somebody that posted this week, and Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah, obviously facing strong criticism for a social media post about the Minnesota shooting suspect. Yesterday, Lee posted a picture of the suspect at the door of one of the lawmakers with the caption, this is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way. It is a pinned tweet at the top of his page. 20-five minutes later, the senator posted another picture of the suspected shooter with the caption, ‘Nightmare on Waltz Street,’ mocking, of course, the situation with the name of the Minnesota governor. Both of those posts came hours before Lee tweeted a happy Father’s Day message. A conservative journalist, Brad Polumbo, responded to one of the posts, writing, quote, ‘What the hell is Mike Lee doing? Has he completely lost it? Meanwhile, contributing editor for ‘The Atlantic,’ Norm Ornstein, wrote, ‘Even for Mike Lee, this is beyond disgusting. Disinformation beneath contempt.’ We’re used to — Senator, we’re used to wackos on the extremes on both sides posting bizarre things on social media. What happens when it’s mainstreamed by a senator, again, a guy that I’ve known and who used to try to be a thoughtful, conservative voice for small government conservatism, when he starts posting things like this? And what is the — what’s the United States Senate’s answer to that? I only ask that because I can tell you back in my days, I guess in the Stone Age it is now, I mean, a senator on either side would have been roundly condemned by members of his or her own party if they had done this.”
Klobuchar: “I have condemned what Mike Lee did here at home, and I will speak to him about this when I return. And what I’m going to tell him is, you know, this isn’t funny, what happened here. This was an incredible woman, her husband, her two kids, yesterday on Father’s Day. There was no Father’s Day for them. They lost both their parents. I’ll tell him about the law enforcement that did incredible work here. We had a 43 hour manhunt, the biggest manhunt in Minnesota’s history, hundreds and hundreds of officers, 20 SWAT teams going door to door to door, citizens on edge, hiding in their homes. And they finally were able to arrest this man who was armed, but there was not a shooting, and bring him into custody and did their jobs. And by the way, if the police had not on their own decided to go over to Representative Hortman’s home without a call because of what they noticed, of course, had happened, the tragedy at Senator Hoffman’s house, they thought, well, maybe we should check this out. While they weren’t able to prevent the deaths, they were able to identify the suspect because he ran out and his car was left there. Otherwise, more people would have been killed. So that’s what I’m going to tell Senator Lee when I get back to Washington today, because this is not a laughing matter. And certainly what we’re seeing in increasing violence and this evil man who did this, this is not a joke.”