WASHINGTON – The son of a prominent Republican senator apologized May 13 after a GOP congressman said he verbally accosted him with antisemitic slurs in front of a reporter at a Capitol Hill bar.
Rep. Mike Lawler, R-New York, said that William Paul, the son of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, approached him on the night of May 12 at the Tune Inn Restaurant and Bar. The Republican congressman said that the senator's son warned him that if Thomas Massie, another GOP lawmaker from Kentucky, were to lose his upcoming primary election, it would be because of Lawler's "people."
When Lawler asked him to clarify, William Paul yelled out, "Jews."
"He then went on a roughly 10-minute diatribe about Israel, about Jews," Lawler, who is not Jewish, told reporters on the steps of the Capitol the next day, "and at one point said that he hates Jews and hates gays and doesn't care if they die."
It all occurred directly in front of a reporter for the news outlet NOTUS, which first reported on the incident.
