Michigan Dem Abdul El-Sayed Claimed Citizenship In Muslim Country
Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed once claimed to hold Egyptian citizenship, newly unearthed video shows. El-Sayed made the claim in 2016…
The 2016 video is not hard to find. At a Detroit conference, Abdul El-Sayed told the room he held Egyptian citizenship. Now his campaign says he never did.
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Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed once claimed to hold Egyptian citizenship, newly unearthed video shows.
El-Sayed made the claim in 2016 when he spoke at the GlobeMed conference in Detroit, accordin g to a video found by the Washington Free Beacon. The Michigan Democrat’s campaign previously said that El-Sayed has never been a dual citizen despite the fact he once listed Egyptian citizenship on his resume.
“I carry dual citizenship, and I grew up spending most of my summers in another country where I understood what it meant not to have the right to self-govern,” El-Sayed said in the video. The comment was made during the time El-Sayed led Detroit’s health department.
El-Sayed’s parents immigrated to the United States from Egypt, and he was born in Rochester Hills, Michigan. Shortly after becoming a professor at Columbia University in 2014, El-Sayed claimed on his resume that he had American and Egyptian citizenship.
His campaign told the Free Beacon that listing was a mistake after the outlet flagged the resume. Campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner blamed the dual citizenship boast on El-Sayed being “told as a child that his grandfather had pursued Egyptian citizenship on his behalf, for which he was eligible due to his parents being born in Egypt.”
“Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been,” she said, adding that he was “unable to find any documentation to verify this claim” when he tried to check “later in life.”
The Daily Wire reached out to El-Sayed’s campaign to inquire about the timeline of when the candidate learned that he was not an Egyptian citizen. The video shows that he made the claim for at least a two-year period.
El-Sayed, running against Republican Mike Rogers, is looking to be the first Muslim elected to the U.S. Senate.
Back in 2009, he told The New York Times that he had pledged to live his life in compliance with Sharia law.
“Ultimately, the question is, when I die and I stand before God and go through everything I did in my life, I don’t want to say I did it the easy way instead of the Shariah-compliant way. Not because of fear but because of obligation,” he said.
In the past, El-Sayed has attempted to obscure his links to Islam. He once asked a documentary film crew to avoid filming a bookshelf that included multiple Qurans and a book written by an Islamic scholar linked to the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist attack.
“You’re going to want to not get these things in the shot … we’re trying to keep the shot secular,” he said.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
The 2016 video is not hard to find. At a Detroit conference, Abdul El-Sayed told the room he held Egyptian citizenship. Now his campaign says he never did. That is a plain old contradiction, and Michigan voters deserve to know which version is true. This is not a gotcha about a technical form. It is a man running for the United States Senate who cannot keep his own biography straight.
Maybe dual citizenship is a side note in a campaign. But claiming it to one audience and denying it to another is a character issue. The man is asking to represent Michigan in a chamber that writes immigration law. If he is willing to bend the truth about who he is, why would anyone trust him with the details of a border deal or a security clearance? His campaign had plenty of time to say “yes, he said that, and here is what he meant.” Instead they chose a flat denial that the tape now makes look silly.
This is not about where his family is from, and it is not about Egypt. It is about honesty. El-Sayed has spent this race as the clean-handed progressive, the smartest guy in the room. Now we see the usual political reflex: careful wording, walk-backs, and hoping nobody checks the tape. We checked. The tape is there. Michigan Republicans should make sure every voter in the state sees it before the primary.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.