Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, told campaign staffers on a private strategy call that he wanted to avoid any public comment on the Israeli airstrike that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, because, he said, "there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today."
The March 1 call, one day after the Feb. 28 strike, was obtained in audio form by the Washington Free Beacon. On it, El-Sayed laid out a messaging plan built not around principle or policy but around evasion, deflection, and a willingness to smear political opponents with unrelated accusations rather than say plainly whether he supported or opposed the elimination of a man who oversaw decades of state-sponsored terror.
The recording offers a rare, unfiltered look at how a Democratic Senate hopeful calibrates his public positions, not by conviction, but by the emotional temperature of a voter bloc he needs to win a primary.
El-Sayed told his communications team he did not want to touch the Khamenei topic at all. His stated reason was blunt: Muslim voters in Dearborn were grieving. The city became the nation's first Arab-majority city in 2023. In 2024, a plurality of Dearborn voters cast ballots for President Donald Trump.
If reporters pressed him, El-Sayed said, his plan was to change the subject entirely, to Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. His words, captured on the call:
"I'm just gonna go straight to pedophilia, frankly. I'll just be like, 'Pedophile president decides that he doesn't like the front page news, so he decides to take us into another war.'"
That was the fallback: not a policy argument, not a constitutional objection, not even a coherent anti-war position. Just a pre-planned smear designed to derail any question about whether the death of Iran's supreme leader was justified.
El-Sayed also discussed a second pivot if the Epstein deflection failed. He would attack Israel and AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He told staffers that reporters would "try and bait us into saying, 'Yeah, but isn't it justified now that they took [Khamenei] out, right? And I just think, for us, we've got to be, like, 'no.'"
He framed his potential attack on AIPAC as taking "the whole shot," telling his team he would say AIPAC-backed members of Congress refused to check presidential military power. The ongoing turmoil inside the Democratic Party over its direction on foreign policy was clearly on his mind, but his concern was tactical, not moral.
"You know what benefits [from the war]? It benefits Israel, who has captured too many of our politicians through AIPAC contributions."
El-Sayed predicted that a left-wing influencer he referred to as "Welch", presumably Jennifer Welch, who released a podcast episode with him on March 4, would try to draw him into a public discussion about Israel. He told his team he needed to "set up the whole shot" if he was going to go there at all.
The call reveals a candidate who views nearly every public statement as a minefield to be navigated rather than a moment to lead. El-Sayed told staffers he believed they had "the moral high ground", but his plan for holding it consisted of saying as little as possible about the actual event that had just reshaped the Middle East.
Ali Khamenei had served as Iran's supreme leader since 1989. Under his rule, Iran's state apparatus directed and funded terrorist operations that killed hundreds of Americans, among many others. The Feb. 28 Israeli airstrike that ended his life was part of what has been called Operation Epic Fury.
El-Sayed's response to this was not to weigh the strategic implications or the moral calculus. It was to protect his flank in Dearborn.
That instinct, to treat the death of a terror-sponsoring dictator as a PR problem rather than a geopolitical event, tells voters everything they need to know about how El-Sayed would operate in the Senate. The question is not whether he would represent Michigan. The question is which constituency's feelings would govern his votes.
The leaked call is not the only window into El-Sayed's political instincts. After a Dearborn Heights resident attacked a synagogue and preschool in West Bloomfield, Michigan, El-Sayed released a lengthy video statement denouncing the attack. But he added a detail that reframed the attacker as a victim: the attacker, he said, "lost family, including two children, in an airstrike in Lebanon last week. They were innocent people."
The Israel Defense Forces announced soon after the attack that the attacker's brother was a Hezbollah commander.
On a subsequent organizing call, later leaked to Punchbowl News, El-Sayed acknowledged that his video statement was a "risk." The fact that he viewed basic sympathy for a terror attack on a synagogue and preschool as politically risky says more about the primary electorate he is courting than any poll could.
He followed up on X with a post casting himself as brave for speaking out:
"The 'risk' I took that these cowards will NEVER take is having the courage to call out an illegal and unjustified war that's killing children, wasting our tax dollars, and spiking gas prices, too."
El-Sayed's associations raise their own questions. He appeared as a featured speaker at an online progressive rally alongside Hasan Piker, a popular streamer who has said the United States "deserved 9/11." The two are scheduled to appear together at rallies at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University on April 7.
During that same rally, left-wing streamer Vaush said he did not know how the "Democratic Party can survive" without making opposition to Israel a core tenet. El-Sayed jumped into the discussion. The broader picture, a Senate candidate sharing stages with figures who justify the 9/11 attacks and who want anti-Israel politics baked into the Democratic platform, is not incidental. It is the campaign.
The broader lack of direction inside the Democratic Party has created space for candidates like El-Sayed to build primary coalitions around positions that would have been disqualifying a decade ago.
El-Sayed's public record extends well beyond this single call. The Free Beacon reported in December on deleted social media posts from El-Sayed. In a 2021 op-ed, he argued that both 9/11 and the war on terror were "perpetrated ignorantly" and driven by "tribalistic grievance." In his 2020 memoir, he wrote that he refused to face the American flag during the national anthem as a college athlete.
None of these are gaffes. They form a consistent worldview, one in which American power is suspect, Israel is an aggressor, and the appropriate response to the killing of a dictator who funded terror against Americans is strategic silence calibrated to protect a voter base.
El-Sayed is running in a crowded Michigan Senate primary. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, another candidate, said in October that Israel's war against Hamas met "the definition" of genocide and later criticized the U.S.-Israeli operation against Iran. Rep. Haley Stevens, also in the race, took a different tone, stating that "Iran's state sponsorship of terror across the globe has led to chaos and unchecked violence" while calling for a congressional check on presidential military power.
Dearborn's mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, has called for the destruction of Israel and said Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack was "inevitable." That is the political environment El-Sayed is navigating, and his leaked call shows he is navigating it by telling voters nothing and hoping they fill in the blanks.
When the Free Beacon sought comment, the campaign did not address the substance of the call. Instead, David Mitrani, a partner at the Sandler Reiff law firm in Washington, D.C., sent a note focused entirely on the recording's provenance:
"I write to inform you that the audio recording that you base the below questions on was obtained without the campaign's permission, and without knowledge that individuals were being recorded. The campaign is considering its legal options against the individual in question. Given these circumstances, the campaign expects that you will take this into account in determining whether to proceed with any reporting on this matter."
The campaign threatened legal action against whoever recorded the call. It did not deny a single word El-Sayed said on it.
That response is its own kind of confirmation. When the defense is "you weren't supposed to hear that," the content speaks for itself.
Michigan voters deserve a Senate candidate who can say plainly whether the killing of a dictator who sponsored terror against Americans was a good thing or a bad thing. Abdul El-Sayed's answer, on a call he thought was private, was that he'd rather talk about anything else. That's not leadership. That's calculation, and the people of Michigan can see the math.
