A 2016 video shows Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed telling a Detroit audience he carries dual U.S.-Egypt citizenship, a claim his campaign now flatly denies.
El-Sayed, then Detroit’s health director, made the remark onstage at a GlobeMed conference while describing summers spent in Egypt and what he said it taught him about self-government.
The Washington Free Beacon obtained the previously unreported footage and published it this month. His campaign had already walked back a similar citizenship claim after a résumé report earlier this cycle. It did not answer questions about the 2016 stage statement.
For voters, the gap is simple. El-Sayed said one thing in public, more than once. His aides now say the opposite.
At the Detroit conference, El-Sayed did not hedge.
He framed the claim as lived experience, tying it to summers abroad and limits on political rights in Egypt.
"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 onstage in 2016, per the Free Beacon’s account of the video.
He also recounted being questioned by Egyptian police after cursing then-president Hosni Mubarak during a summer visit, a story the outlet notes he still tells on the trail years later.
That 2016 line was not his first public claim of Egyptian citizenship status. A 2014 academic résumé identified him as a citizen of the United States and Egypt, the Free Beacon reported in January. The campaign called that entry a mistake.
Campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner drew a hard line when the résumé surfaced.
"Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been,"
Richner told the Free Beacon.
She blamed secondhand family information and said later checks turned up nothing on paper.
"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 account is that El-Sayed was told as a child his grandfather had pursued Egyptian citizenship for him, and that the person who told him was wrong. Aides have not named that relative. They also did not respond to the Free Beacon’s questions about the 2016 onstage statement after the video emerged.
So the public record, as the outlet laid it out, shows two earlier claims of Egyptian citizenship status, the résumé and the conference video, and a campaign that now says neither was true in any verifiable sense.
El-Sayed was born in Michigan in 1984. His parents left Egypt for the Detroit area in 1978. His father, an engineering professor at Eastern Michigan University, has been described by El-Sayed as a democracy agitator who ran afoul of Egyptian authorities and came to the United States for academic work.
His parents divorced when he was three. His biological mother settled in Missouri and worked in health care. For years she worked at the Islamic American Relief Agency, a nonprofit the U.S. sanctioned in 2004 for funneling money to al Qaeda, the Free Beacon reported.
None of that biography settles the citizenship dispute. It does explain why Egyptian politics and identity have followed him into a Michigan Senate race.
El-Sayed, a Democrat running as a far-left Senate hopeful, has repeatedly attacked Republican rival Mike Rogers for owning a home in Florida. The contrast notes itself for anyone watching the dual-citizenship fight.
A candidate who polices another man’s out-of-state house has spent years talking about summers in Egypt, Egyptian self-rule, and, on at least two documented occasions, Egyptian citizenship. His campaign now says those citizenship claims were never real. Rogers’ Florida property is a matter of record El-Sayed chose to weaponize. His own past statements are also a matter of record.
Financial disclosures add another overseas thread. El-Sayed owns rental property in the United Arab Emirates and carries outstanding debt to an Emirati developer behind a resort-style community marketed with a lagoon and white sandy beaches, according to disclosure details the Free Beacon has reported.
In 2012, El-Sayed signed an open letter with figures described as leaders of the Egyptian community. The letter urged the Muslim Brotherhood and then-president Mohamed Morsi to “purge the media and police” to lock in the Islamist group’s power, the Free Beacon reported in earlier coverage tied to this race.
He has criticized secular Egyptian presidents, including Mubarak and Abdel el-Sisi, while offering warmer words for Islamist figures, in the pattern the outlet has described. He has also referred to commentator Bassem Youssef as a “fellow Egyptian” and said of him, “He’s hilarious.”
Those choices do not prove dual citizenship. They do show a candidate comfortable claiming Egyptian identity in public when it suits a speech, a résumé, or a punchline, then stepping back when ballots and vetting enter the picture.
Michigan voters now have the 2016 video, the 2014 résumé language, and the campaign’s categorical denial. What they do not have is a direct answer from El-Sayed’s team to the onstage dual-citizenship boast the Free Beacon unearthed.
In a Senate race, words on a stage and lines on a résumé are not small print. If a candidate tells Michigan he carries two passports’ worth of loyalty, then says never mind, voters get to decide which version they trust.
