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A major fire broke out in a building housing an office for Sen. Rand Paul in Bowling Green, Kentucky, ahead of the weekend, resulting in major losses.
The blaze broke out early Friday morning, as “fire crews were called to the building on State Steet around 2 a.m. Friday and found a heavy blaze that required additional units, Bowling Green Fire Department spokeswoman Katie McKee told the Daily News,” The Associated Press reported.
Six units spent several hours working to extinguish the flames, with firefighters utilizing ladder trucks to combat the blaze from above. The fire resulted in a roof collapse, and at sunrise, a dense plume of heavy gray smoke ascended from the top of the building, as reported by the newspaper.
McKee said there were no injuries reported and, at the time of publication, no cause had yet been established. But the cause remains under investigation.
In a statement, Paul expressed his gratitude to the first responders who promptly arrived to extinguish the fire. He mentioned that his office is cooperating with authorities to assess damages and identify the cause of the incident. Paul assured that his office would continue to function and serve constituents, the AP noted.
“We have a very well established emergency management plan and have the ability to continue operations that will not impact our work helping Kentuckians,” he said.
Meanwhile, last week, Paul took to Twitter, now known as “X,” to announce he has made another criminal referral of former NIAID chief Dr. Anthony Fauci to the Justice Department after he says he discovered evidence that Fauci allegedly committed perjury during a Senate hearing in 2021.
Paul accused Fauci of lying to Congress over his claim that the U.S. government never funded dangerous gain-of-function research in China, where the outbreak reportedly began.
In 2021, Fauci testified before a Senate committee where the Kentucky Republican was a member and said under oath that the U.S. “has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology” in Wuhan, China.
But in newly released emails dated February 1, 2020, the then-NIAID director wrote that “scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain-of-function experiments to determine that molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan.”
While those emails do not contain smoking gun evidence of guilt, Fauci, under oath, denied that the National Institutes of Health, under which his agency fell, did not fund such research.
However, “the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined last month that the Wuhan Institute of Virology and Wuhan University did receive NIH funding,” according to the UK’s Daily Mail.
In a tweet, Paul said he had referred Fauci — again — to the Department of Justice to pursue a criminal investigation for allegedly lying to Congress.
“I’ve referred Anthony Fauci to the DOJ (again) for lying to Congress when he denied the NIH was funding of gain-of-function research in Wuhan,” he wrote.
“Last week’s release of an email in which Fauci confirms that research in Wuhan was gain-of-function adds to an email where his assistants label it GoF as well. Likely nothing more conclusive than catching a liar lying with his own words!” he added.
The Daily Mail added:
On July 13, 2023 the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released the emails sent by Dr Fauci about a conference call regarding the origins of Covid attended by Dr Fauci, Dr Francis Collins, former director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and other researchers.
Gain-of-function research is medical research that genetically alters a virus to make it more deadly or infectious to try and get ahead of natural mutations that might occur.
In September 2021, Paul accused Fauci of lying to Congress and said he deserved the five-year prison sentence that entails, especially after all of the death and illnesses Americans suffered because of the illness and his often incorrect advice on how to respond to it.
He doubled down on that in December 2022 as Fauci was preparing to retire.
