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.’”

That anger regularly left employees in tears, four former staffers said. She yelled, threw papers, and sometimes even hurled objects; one aide was accidentally hit with a flying binder, according to someone who saw it happen, though the staffer said the senator did not intend to hit anyone with the binder when she threw it.

“I cried. I cried, like, all the time,” said one former staffer.

[ . . . ]

When staffers made mistakes, the emails show, she reamed them out—and sometimes, emails show, threatened to fire them—over threads that included many of their colleagues.

A former staffer told the Huffington Post about an alleged incident in which most of the staff had been running late to the office, prompting Klobuchar to leave tardy slips on their desks. It apparently was no joke, and an aide who was called into her office left “in tears.”

In a statement to both BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, a spokesman said that “Senator Klobuchar loves her staff—they are the reason she has gotten to where she is today,” and listed several staffers who had remained with her for years.

After this story was published, The Huffington Post issued a third report seemingly corroborating the allegations surrounding Klobuchar. According to the new article, multiple sources alleged that Klobuchar’s mistreatment of office staff began more than a decade ago, and that in 2015, then Senate minority leader Harry Reid told her privately that she had to change her behavior. (A spokesperson for Reid told HuffPost that Reid does not remember whether they had such a discussion.)

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.)

Several staffers went on the record to both the Huffington Post and BuzzFeed to defend their boss, saying that while she was demanding, it was because she held the highest standards for her staff. A few suggested she was being held to a different standard due to sexism: “I’ve heard people say she’s tough to work for and I sometimes cringe when I hear it because I rarely hear that said about male bosses in Congress despite the fact that half of Congress is tough to work for,” Tristan Brown, a former legislative aide, told HuffPost, adding that Klobuchar was “probably the most brilliant, hardworking person I’ve had the privilege to work for.”

Though rumors about Klobuchar’s conduct have circulated for years, one staffer told BuzzFeed they were coming forward now out of a sense of public duty in advance of her 2020 announcement. “The reason it matters is when I hear the descriptors of our current president and how he lacks responsibility and everyone is to blame, and there’s erratic behavior, name-calling,” said the staffer. “It’s unfortunate, but you’re also describing her.”

This article has been updated.

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