With less than 48 hours remaining until Amy Klobuchar is expected to announce a presidential run, the “Minnesota nice” senator is grappling with not one, but two deeply reported articles alleging that she is verbally abusive, creating a fraught office environment fueled by fear. “I’ve always been taught that your true character shows in how you treat those with less power than you, especially behind closed doors,” one former staffer said in a BuzzFeed report published Friday. “The way Sen. Klobuchar behaves in private with her staff is very different than when she’s in the public eye, and that kind of cruelty shouldn’t be acceptable for anyone.” Earlier in the week, the Huffington Post published a similar story, alleging that at least three people had turned down the opportunity to manage Klobuchar’s campaign due to her reputation for cruelty and repeated emotional abuse.
Klobuchar’s alleged temper was not unknown in Washington. Last year, The New York Times noted that, “On Capitol Hill, Ms. Klobuchar’s reputation is not all sweetness and light.” A March 2018 article in Politico described Klobuchar as among the “worst bosses in Congress,” with the highest office turnover rate in the Senate. But the new details reported by BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, if true, are particularly damning. BuzzFeed reviewed e-mails, often sent between 1 and 4 in the morning, in which Klobuchar “regularly berated employees, often in all capital letters, over minor mistakes, misunderstandings, and misplaced commas. Klobuchar, in the e-mails, which were mostly sent over the past few years, referred to her staff’s work as ‘the worst in . . . years,’ and ‘the worst in my life.’”
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Notably, the allegations directly contradict Klobuchar’s public persona as one of the warmest, friendliest people in the Senate. Klobuchar’s popularity in Minnesota, too, is indisputable: she has won all three of her Senate elections with double-digit margins, including during the 2018 midterms, even as Minnesota became a battleground for Democrats trying to win back the House. (Her potential presidential candidacy rests on the notion that her success in Minnesota proves she can unite the country and help win back the Midwest, where Democratic candidates have otherwise struggled; in 2016, Hillary Clinton lost every state in the Midwest except Minnesota and Illinois.)
