Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed told a Detroit audience in 2016 that he carried dual citizenship in the United States and Egypt, according to previously unreported video. The statement clashes with his campaign’s current insistence that he never held dual citizenship.
El-Sayed made the declaration while appearing [1] onstage at a GlobeMed conference in Detroit. The far-left Democrat was serving as the city’s health director when he described his connection to both countries in unmistakable terms.
“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. His parents emigrated from Egypt to the Detroit area in 1978.
During the appearance, El-Sayed also recounted being questioned by Egyptian police during one of those summer visits. He said the encounter occurred after he publicly cursed Hosni Mubarak, who was Egypt’s president at the time.
El-Sayed continues to tell that story on the campaign trail a decade later. The newly disclosed recording, however, marks at least the second documented occasion on which he publicly claimed to have citizenship status in Egypt.
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An academic résumé from 2014 stated that El-Sayed was a citizen of both the United States and Egypt, the Washington Free Beacon previously reported. His campaign later told the Free Beacon that the candidate had been mistaken about his citizenship status.
“Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been,” campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Free Beacon. She said El-Sayed had received incorrect information about the matter when he was a child.
Richner said El-Sayed was “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.” The campaign has not identified the person who allegedly gave him that information.
“This was an error based on what he was told by family members secondhand,” Richner said. “When he tried to verify this later on in life, he and his family were unable to find any documentation to verify this claim.”
The campaign’s explanation now faces another complication from El-Sayed’s own recorded remarks in 2016. His campaign did not respond to questions about that statement, leaving the contradiction between the video and its current position unresolved.
El-Sayed was working as a public health scholar in 2014 when the dual citizenship assertion appeared on his academic résumé. False résumé statements, including claims involving ethnic identity, are considered a grave offense in academia.
The Democrat has repeatedly attacked his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, for owning a home in Florida. At the same time, El-Sayed’s financial disclosure states that he owns rental property in the United Arab Emirates and owes money to an Emirati developer.
That developer is behind a “resort-style” community that boasts “a stunning lagoon and white sandy beaches.” El-Sayed has faced additional scrutiny concerning foreign ties as he campaigns for the Michigan Senate seat.
Born in Michigan in 1984, El-Sayed has said his father was an engineering professor at Eastern Michigan University. He said his father left Egypt to pursue academic studies and because he was a “democracy agitator” who had run afoul of Egyptian authorities.
El-Sayed’s biological mother divorced his father when El-Sayed was three years old, settled in Missouri, and works in health care. She worked for years at the Islamic American Relief Agency, a nonprofit group sanctioned in 2004 for funneling money to al Qaeda.
The candidate has voiced mixed feelings about Egypt, criticizing secular presidents including Mubarak and Abdel el-Sisi while praising Islamist leaders. In 2012, he signed an open letter with “leaders of the Egyptian community” urging the Muslim Brotherhood and then president Mohamed Morsi to “purge the media and police.”
The letter said those actions would help solidify the Islamist group’s power. El-Sayed has also called Bassem Youssef, an antisemitic pundit who claims Israel was behind 9/11, a “fellow Egyptian.”
The resurfaced GlobeMed video puts El-Sayed’s past words directly against his campaign’s present explanation. With a résumé and a public appearance carrying the same citizenship claim, the campaign’s denial now must contend with two documented examples from the candidate himself.