Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed told a Detroit audience in 2016 that he has “dual citizenship” in the United States and Egypt, according to a previously unreported video obtained by our Chuck Ross. It’s the second time that we know of that El-Sayed has made the claim, one that his campaign now says is not true.
“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, whose parents emigrated from Egypt to the Detroit area in 1978, said at a GlobeMed conference that took place while he served as the city’s health director. He went on to say he was questioned by Egyptian police during one of those summer visits for publicly cursing Egypt’s president at the time, a story he still tells on the campaign trail a decade later.
“The newly revealed 2016 video marks at least the second time El-Sayed has publicly claimed to have Egyptian status,” Ross writes. “His academic résumé stated in 2014 that he was a citizen of the United States and Egypt, the Free Beacon previously reported.” El-Sayed’s campaign told us at the time that he was mistaken about his citizenship status, which he “tried to verify … later on in life” but was “unable to find any documentation.”
“El-Sayed has expressed mixed feelings about his ancestral homeland. He has criticized secular Egyptian presidents like Mubarak and Abdel el-Sisi, while praising its Islamist leaders. In 2012, he signed an open letter alongside ‘leaders of the Egyptian community’ that urged the repressive Muslim Brotherhood and then-president Mohamed Morsi to ‘purge the media and police’ in order to solidify the Islamist group’s power. El-Sayed has referred to Bassem Youssef, an antisemitic pundit who claims Israel was behind 9/11, as a ‘fellow Egyptian.’ ‘He’s hilarious,’ El-Sayed said of Youssef.”
