Early last Saturday, Vance Boelter allegedly murdered Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in their Brooklyn Park home, and shot State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in their Champlin home (reportedly a combined 17 times) shortly afterward.
Following “the largest manhunt in the state’s history,” Boelter, 57, was arrested on Sunday night. He was captured in a field located near his Green Isle home in Sibley County.
“Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the investigation” told local media outlet Alpha News on Friday that Boelter had written a so-called “confession letter” to FBI Director Kash Patel in which he blamed his deadly rampage on Gov. Tim Walz.
Alpha News reported:
The handwritten letter was discovered by law enforcement inside the Buick that Boelter purchased just hours after [the shootings].The charging documents indicate that a handwritten note from “Dr. Vance Luther Boelter” was found and that Boelter confirmed that he was the “shooter at large in Minnesota involved in the 2 shootings.”The charges also indicate that Boelter bought the Buick and an e-bike for $900, from a man he didn’t know, at a bus stop in north Minneapolis.That man drove Boelter to a U.S. Bank where Boelter emptied $2,200 from his account.
The Minnesota Star Tribune provided more details about the letter. According to “two people familiar” with its contents, Boelter claimed that Walz had asked him to kill Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) so that he could run for Senate.
Additionally, Boelter wrote that he had been trained “off the books” by the military.
The letter is also said to contain Boelter’s confession to the shootings.
The sources described the letter as “incoherent, one and a half pages long, confusing and hard to read.”
Boelter’s allegations are, of course, delusional. They are the ramblings of a madman.
But you may recall that in the immediate aftermath of the shootings, and particularly after police released Boelter’s “hit list” of potential targets, which included more than 60 Democrats and even abortion clinics, Democrats were quick to brand him as a MAGA extremist, blaming Republican rhetoric for inciting his brutal attacks.
But if anything, Boelter’s letter revealed that, in his own distorted mind, he felt more aligned with Walz than with any Republican.
That leaves more than a few conservatives wondering if news of this letter is the reason why coverage of this rather sensational story, “was out of the news by Tuesday.”
Following the news about Boelter’s letter, RedState’s Bonchie concluded, “It’s pretty clear why the story disappeared.”
[Republicans were] being broadly blamed by the press and Democrats because of who the targets were. Networks like MSNBC and CNN went so far as to directly point the finger at President Donald Trump. Yet, [the] letter … points in a completely different direction.According to the Star Tribune … Boelter believed he was operating under orders from Democrat Gov. Tim Walz.Early on, it was revealed that Boelter was appointed to a government workforce board by Walz. What their actual relationship was remains unclear, but it appears the killer thought they had a relationship. For whatever reason, Boelter had convinced himself that he needed to kill others so that Walz could run for the U.S. Senate.In other words, Boelter is just an insane person. Nothing in his letter makes logical sense, and there is no indication he did what he did in support of Trump or anyone else on the political right. Instead, he seems to have been infatuated with Walz and created a justification to kill in service to him.
PJ Media’s Matt Margolis arrived at the same conclusion in a Friday night post titled Now We Know Why the Minnesota Assassin Story Disappeared Overnight.
Initial media coverage was rife with speculation, with left-leaning outlets eager to cast Boelter as a MAGA Republican, hastily blaming the GOP and even President Donald Trump for inciting his shooting spree.Walz appointed Boelter to a government workforce board, a fact that seemingly fueled his delusion of a personal relationship with the governor. But this imagined relationship was the extent of any link, as the letter’s ramblings make clear. There is no evidence that support for Trump or any conservative cause motivated Boelter’s actions. Instead, his violent spree was rooted in a deranged fixation on Walz, a far cry from the media’s initial narrative that sought to weaponize the tragedy against the pro-Trump right.In short, Boelter is just a wacko. His letter is a testament to his fractured mind, not a manifesto of political grievance. The media’s rush to blame conservatives and the governor’s passive complicity in allowing false narratives to spread are failures that demand scrutiny. The truth matters, and in this case, it exposes a grotesque distortion of reality by those eager to score political points amid a horrific crime.
I think they may be on to something.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on LinkedIn or X.
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