WHAT’S HAPPENING
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is facing scrutiny over his family's alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and other terror groups.
After twice denying on Meet the Press that he or his family had any connection to the group, social media posts from his half-sister surfaced contradicting those claims. The controversy has dominated the final weeks of his tight Senate race against Republican Mike Rogers.
Follow the full story: The American Islam series and related reporting
THE FACTS
El-Sayed’s half-sister wrote in 2012: “My family has long been MB.” She also described their mother’s “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early ’70s.”
In 2013, Abdelhadi posted: “I have had family jailed for being a part of it. Praying for all my family that supports the #MB in Egypt.”
El-Sayed’s mother worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, which was designated a terrorist organization in 2004 for funding al-Qaeda and Hamas.
Court documents named his mother more than a dozen times in connection with wire transfers between 1999 and 2002.
His father-in-law has served on the Islamic Society of North America’s founding committee since 2007 and gave over $300,000 to a pro-El-Sayed super PAC.
ISNA was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation case, which ended in convictions for funneling $12 million to Hamas.
In November 2012, El-Sayed signed a letter backing Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi’s “revolutionary decisions” and urging him to “purge the media and the police.”
When NBC confronted him with the posts, El-Sayed said he had “never had these conversations” with his mother and called the evidence “hearsay from a tweet.”
Asked on Fox News whether the Brotherhood should be designated a terrorist group, he dodged: “Show me that they’re engaged [in violence].”
At an event a few days ago, he disavowed the Brotherhood when a voter asked him directly.
OUR TAKE
The evidence points to El-Sayed’s family having direct ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and then seemingly indirect ties to even more radical groups like al-Qaeda and Hamas. For this reason, and because of a calculated political move not to upset Muslim voters in Michigan, he has been extremely slow to disavow the Brotherhood.
This election is about much bigger issues than this, but it’s still concerning that El-Sayed has such a long record of backing radical policies in places like Egypt and works so hard to avoid distancing himself from radical groups.
