Abdul El-Sayed Has A Deleted 9/11 Tweets Problem

Deleting your own tweet history right before the 25th anniversary of 9/11 is a strange look for anyone running for Senate, but especially for a guy whose old posts on the subject are apparently the ones he'd most like people to forget. Abdul El-Sayed's campaign has an explanation ready, of course: it was just a general housekeeping move, wiping everything before July 2023. Sure. That's a lot of housekeeping to happen to cover exactly the years when his 9/11 commentary would be under the microscope.

Here's the thing about scrubbing your digital past in politics: it almost never reads as tidiness. It reads as anticipation. Somebody on that campaign knew those old posts were a liability long before Politico came sniffing around, and the timing, weeks before a solemn national anniversary, makes the cleanup look less like routine maintenance and more like triage.

Voters in Michigan deserve to know what their Senate candidate actually said about the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil, not a sanitized version his team curated after the fact. If the tweets were defensible, they'd still be up. If they weren't, deleting them doesn't make the views disappear, it just adds a second problem on top of the first: a candidate who says one thing publicly and tries to erase the record when it becomes inconvenient.

We've seen this movie before with plenty of politicians on both sides, and it never ends with "nothing to see here." El-Sayed owes voters a real accounting, not a cleared timeline and a shrug.