Catie Clark

As the token conservative at the Timberjay — yes, this is an equal-opportunity newsroom — I tend to take a more charitable view of Pete Stauber’s absenteeism that those of my employer and journalistic colleagues. I’m not convinced that Stauber is unresponsive to his constituents and hostile to their views. In fact, looking at the evidence objectively, I’ve come to a different conclusion.
All the evidence suggests that Pete Stauber may really be missing. As evidence, just look at all the missing person signs kindly and charitably produced by the Minnesota DFL in February. A call to the DFL convinced me that the party is concerned that if Stauber isn’t found before the next election, the Republicans may find a better candidate who actually shows up to attend sessions of the U.S. House of Representatives. That would be bad news for the DFL and Democrats in general if a Republican politician showed up in Washington and did some real governing for a change.
I know that detractors may want to point out that Stauber was on the floor of Congress just last month, supporting legislation to allow mining in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters. What I’m here to tell you now is that after a deep investigation, this may actually be a scam and Minnesota’s voters may have been misled about Stauber’s missing status, though we are currently unsure who is behind it.
My investigation has me convinced that what looked like Stauber in C-Span coverage was really a Tesla-brand Optimus robot in a suit and a latex Stauber mask. The C-Span coverage may also have been hacked by malefactors who we trace to an IP address on the internet with a .ru domain, indicating the involvement of a Russian intelligence operation. The hacking of the C-Span coverage used sophisticated Chinese AI to hide the obvious defects in the robot’s disguise.
A deeper review of C-Span coverage showed an even more disturbing trend: that we could not authenticate the actual presence of the real Pete Stauber on the floor of Congress since 2023, and even then, he wasn’t there a lot, especially since he’s been absent from his seat on the House Committee on Small Business for the last two years.
Concerned that something sinister may have happened to our local congressman, I engaged in some good old-fashioned gum-shoe journalism in order to ascertain Stauber’s whereabouts. I started with Minnesota’s missing person registry – only to find, to my shock, that Minnesota doesn’t have one. No, really. Not only does the state not have one, Minnesota also has not mandated that missing persons be reported to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, like many other states.
Regardless, I did dive into the NamUs database but could not find Stauber anywhere. Just to be thorough, I have confirmed that Stauber is not a transgender individual. That’s important because ever since Trump started his second term as president, many missing person records in NamUs for transgender people have vanished. The U.S. Dept. of Justice, which manages NamUs, has not made any comment on the missing transgender records despite multiple inquiries by multiple news organizations and missing person nonprofits.
A visit to the police department in Hermantown, where Stauber allegedly resides, brought me to the office of detective Ernst Ahnungslos, who reassured me that his agency has not received any missing person reports for our absentee U.S. Representative. He expressed an opinion that I had been fooled by a groundless conspiracy theory.
“Seriously, all it would take to show you that Pete Stauber wasn’t really missing is for him to show up to a town hall in the Minnesota Eight Congressional District,” Ahnungslos told me. “How hard would that be for him?”