Hoffman says Angie Craig sought endorsement while he was in ICU

John Hoffman said Angie Craig sought his endorsement for her Senate campaign while he was in intensive care after the June 2025 shootings that wounded him and his wife and killed Melissa Hortman and Mark Hortman. Craig’s campaign rejected the allegation as “categorically false,” and Craig told reporters, “Emphatically, what has been asserted is untrue.”

The dispute lands in the shadow of one of the most violent episodes in recent Minnesota political history. Hoffman and his wife, Yvette Hoffman, were shot at their Champlin home in the June 14 attacks, while former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, were killed in Brooklyn Park. Later accounts said John Hoffman was shot nine times and Yvette Hoffman eight times.

Federal proceedings later identified Vance Boelter as the alleged attacker. Hoffman was released from the intensive care unit and moved to a rehabilitation facility on July 8, 2025, as he continued his recovery from the attack.

Hoffman made the accusation at a Peggy Flanagan campaign event, turning a private medical ordeal into a public campaign fight. Craig, who was running for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, has not only had to defend the timing of any outreach but also the broader question of whether a campaign should seek an endorsement from a lawmaker still recovering from an assassination attempt.

The issue is especially sharp because the ask, if it happened as Hoffman described it, would have come while he was in the ICU and his family was still dealing with the aftermath of a targeted shooting that upended Minnesota politics. Voters weighing the exchange are left with a narrower but consequential judgment: whether campaign ambition crossed a line when one of the state’s most visible lawmakers was fighting to survive.

The episode adds another layer to the political and legal fallout from the June 2025 shootings, which left the state mourning the Hortmans and forced a reckoning over the boundaries of campaign conduct during a medical crisis.