Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed dismissed his sister’s social media claims of longstanding family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood as mere “hearsay” after NBC pressed him on the contradiction.
In a heated exchange with NBC’s Tom Llamas, the left-wing Democrat rejected questions about his half-sister’s posts describing their Egyptian relatives as longtime members of the Islamist group. El-Sayed insisted he had no knowledge of any such ties and cast the reporting as unserious.
The pushback came after El-Sayed had already told Meet the Press that neither he nor his family had links to the Muslim Brotherhood. His sister’s earlier posts said otherwise, and the gap is now a live issue in the Michigan Senate race.
Llamas confronted El-Sayed over the sister’s claims that their mother had been active in the Brotherhood as a college student in Egypt in the 1970s and that relatives had been jailed over those ties. The candidate did not soften.
The Washington Free Beacon reported the exchange in full.
El-Sayed answered first with scorn for the timeline.
"You want to ask me about what was happening in Egypt in 1970? Are you serious?"
Llamas kept the focus on the question he had asked.
"I get it, but you were asked a question,"
El-Sayed then drew a hard line on personal and family involvement.
"Yeah, I'm telling you, like, we, I have no ties. We have no ties,"
When Llamas asked specifically about his mother, El-Sayed said he had never discussed the subject with her.
"I have never had these conversations with my mother,"
He went further, attacking the basis of the questioning itself.
"Like, you're using hearsay evidence from a tweet. This is not serious."
Llamas noted that El-Sayed has gone after the president for truthfulness. El-Sayed asked whether the host was suggesting he had lied. Llamas replied that he did not know, which was why he was asking.
The posts at issue came from Eman Abdelhadi, El-Sayed’s half-sister. They are not new. They date to 2012 and 2013, years before he became a Senate candidate.
Fox News reported that Abdelhadi wrote in 2012 about an “amazing talk” with her mother on her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 1970s while she was in college, tagging the message with “#respect.” In another post that year she stated, “My family has long been MB,” while criticizing how the group had handled politics. She later wrote that she had family jailed for being part of it.
Breitbart noted the same 2012 line, “My family has long been MB”, and a July 2013 post in which Abdelhadi said she had “had family jailed for being a part of it.” Those statements sit directly against El-Sayed’s on-air denials.
Abdelhadi did not respond to questions about her brother’s remarks. Last year she was arrested in Chicago for assaulting a police officer during an anti-ICE protest.
Before the Llamas exchange, El-Sayed appeared on Meet the Press and faced the Brotherhood question head-on. Asked whether he or his family had ties to the group, he answered “No” twice to host Kristen Welker.
His campaign later framed the sister’s posts as debunked racist attacks from Republican opponent Mike Rogers. That is a political answer. It does not erase the words Abdelhadi put on the record more than a decade earlier.
El-Sayed was born in Michigan in 1984 to Fatten Elkomy and Mohamed El-Sayed. His parents split when he was a toddler. He was raised by his father and stepmother. The family history he now waves away as hearsay is the same history his sister described in plain terms when she was not managing a Senate campaign.
The dispute does not stop at social media. National Review detailed additional family and institutional links that El-Sayed’s flat denials leave unaddressed.
His mother, Fatten Elkomy, worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency. The U.S. Treasury accused that group of supporting Hamas and al-Qaeda. Court documents referenced her in connection with wire transfers. El-Sayed has featured his mother in a Mother’s Day campaign video and has stayed in contact with her enough to send money through his sister on Venmo in 2020 for a birthday gift.
His father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, has been a longtime board member of the Islamic Society of North America. Federal prosecutors identified ISNA as a Muslim Brotherhood front group. Jukaku also served on ISNA’s founding committee and as CAIR Michigan president. Both ISNA and CAIR were named as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation case involving Hamas funding.
None of that is “a tweet.” It is a pattern of associations that voters are entitled to hear about when a candidate seeks a seat that deals with national security and foreign policy.
El-Sayed’s own past statements cut against the claim that Brotherhood questions are exotic or irrelevant.
In 2012 he signed an open letter calling on Egypt’s newly elected Muslim Brotherhood government to “purge” the press and the police. In a since-deleted 2021 Substack post, he defended a “friend” jailed for funding the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. In 2016 he said he held dual citizenship in Egypt and the United States; his campaign now calls that statement an “error” based on inaccurate information from an unnamed relative. That same year he served as guardian for Abdelhadi at her wedding, conducted under Sharia law, with their mother featured in the event.
The Muslim Brotherhood is not a campus book club. The group’s Egyptian chapter has a long record of violence, and the organization spawned Hamas in Gaza in the 1980s. A candidate who once urged a Brotherhood government to cleanse Egypt’s press and police, and who later defended someone jailed for funding the group, cannot treat family ties to the same movement as a trivia question from 1970.
El-Sayed wants the public to accept two things at once: that his sister’s firsthand family account is disposable gossip, and that his repeated denials settle the matter. Llamas asked the obvious follow-up. The candidate answered with indignation, not clarity.
Michigan voters can read the sister’s posts, the 2012 letter, the deleted Substack defense, the in-laws’ institutional roles, and the mother’s employment history. They can also hear El-Sayed say he has “no ties” and has “never had these conversations” with his mother. Both records exist. Only one side is asking the public to ignore half of it.
When a Senate candidate’s own family record collides with his television denials, “hearsay” is not a defense. It is a dodge, and voters should treat it that way.
