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.