Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has taken thousands from donors linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, federal records show, raising hard questions about the company he keeps.
Campaign finance filings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show named donors with documented Brotherhood ties writing checks to El-Sayed’s Senate bid, some after years of public roles inside groups federal prosecutors once put under a microscope.
The money is not abstract. It is itemized. And it lands beside a candidate who has long soft-pedaled the Brotherhood’s rise abroad while ducking a straight answer on whether American chapters deserve a terror label at home.
Federal Election Commission entries cited in the Free Beacon’s reporting list Hany Saqr giving $1,000 in March. Mohamed Yahia Abdulrahim gave $1,000 the prior February. Sherif Gindy gave $1,000 the prior December. Abdul Mawgoud Dardery gave $500 in June. Sufian Nabhan contributed $2,500 and hosted a fundraiser with El-Sayed the prior July.
That is thousands of dollars from a small set of names. Each name comes with a paper trail older than the campaign.
Saqr is CEO of Life for Relief and Development. Abdulrahim and Gindy have served on that charity’s board. El-Sayed’s father, Mohamed El-Sayed, and his father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, recently served on the same board. The Free Beacon does not charge the charity itself with a crime. It does show how tightly the candidate’s family circle and the donor circle overlap.
Saqr appears in a 1992 phone directory of U.S.-based Muslim Brotherhood leaders. Federal prosecutors submitted that directory as a government exhibit in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial. Agents seized it from the Virginia home of Ismail Elbarrasse, whom the Free Beacon describes as an alleged Hamas operative.
Abdulrahim appears in the same directory as head of the “economic department.” An internal 1992 Muslim Brotherhood memo, also entered as a government exhibit in that case, described the Islamic Association for Palestine as “the first initiative which was the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Shamm Countries.”
Those are not blog rumors. They are trial exhibits from one of the most significant terror-finance cases in modern American history.
A Middle East Forum report cited by the Free Beacon further noted that Saqr, in 2018, used a Muslim Brotherhood logo as a Facebook profile photo and wrote a post calling Egyptian leader Abdel el-Sisi a “dog of the Jews.” An Egyptian news report in 2013 named Saqr as a Muslim Brotherhood member, the Free Beacon reported.
Gindy did not limit himself to quiet board service. In May 2025 he preached at the Islamic Organization of North America in Michigan. The Middle East Media Research Institute published a translation of the remarks.
Gindy asked, as translated:
"How many mosques were destroyed in India, how many mosques were closed in the whole of the European Union, how many girls were asked not to wear the hijab throughout the world, because Jihad was ceased?"
He pressed further:
"Defending the religion with force, power, and strength,"
And:
"Jihad is not only with force, Jihad has several forms, but one of them was due, one of them was due now."
The Free Beacon reports he went on to lament “what is happening in Palestine” and said “the Jews” would not leave Jerusalem “except by force.” That is the same man who cut a $1,000 check to El-Sayed.
Dardery’s résumé is not subtle. NPR in 2013 described him as foreign affairs spokesman for Mohamed Morsi’s party and a Muslim Brotherhood member. The Freedom and Justice Party was the Brotherhood’s official political vehicle in Egypt. The St. Paul Pioneer Press reported he had served on the Foreign Relations Committee of the Egyptian Parliament before the 2013 military coup that toppled Morsi.
He is now a professor in Minnesota. Free Beacon public-records work found a Social Security number issued to him in Pennsylvania in the 1980s, a dual-national footprint that fits a man who moved between Cairo politics and American academic life. In June he sent El-Sayed $500.
Nabhan sat on the board of directors of the Islamic Association for Palestine in the early 2000s, according to a booklet copy published by the Investigative Project on Terrorism. Hamas leader Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook cofounded the IAP, the Free Beacon notes.
In 2004 a U.S. judge determined the IAP had acted as a fundraising and propaganda conduit for Hamas and ordered it to pay more than $50 million to the family of 17-year-old American David Boim, killed in a Hamas terrorist attack. The group shut down. Last July, Nabhan hosted a fundraiser with El-Sayed and contributed $2,500.
Voters can decide what weight to give a two-decade-old board seat. They should not be asked to pretend the judgment never happened.
Pressed in a Fox News interview on whether he supports U.S. terror designations for Muslim Brotherhood chapters, including the Egyptian branch, El-Sayed declined a direct yes-or-no on those chapters. He offered a narrower line instead.
"I will support a terrorist designation for any organization that is engaged in or committed to political violence,"
That standard sounds firm until someone asks the obvious follow-up the Free Beacon flags: does the Brotherhood meet it? He did not say.
His earlier writing left less doubt about his comfort level. In a 2011 Huffington Post column, El-Sayed argued the United States should not be concerned about the Muslim Brotherhood seizing control in Egypt. After Morsi’s 2012 election, he signed a statement calling on the new regime to “purge the media and the police as quickly as possible,” per prior Free Beacon reporting cited in the same package.
Parents born in Egypt. A citizenship claim as recently as 2016, again per that earlier Free Beacon work. None of that is disqualifying by itself. Pair it with the donor list and the refusal to draw a bright line on Brotherhood designations, and the pattern stops looking accidental.
The Muslim Brotherhood began in Egypt nearly a century ago as a Sunni Islamist political movement bent on imposing Islamic law. Hamas was founded as a branch of it. American prosecutors have spent years mapping the U.S. support networks that grew up around that project, from the Holy Land Foundation case to the IAP judgment.
El-Sayed is running as a Democrat for the U.S. Senate from Michigan. Senate seats come with classified briefings, foreign-policy votes, and oversight of the agencies that designate terrorist groups. Donors who show up in Brotherhood directories, old Hamas-linked boards, and sermons about jihad “due now” are not routine small-dollar noise.
Campaigns love to talk about “who can afford to run.” Taxpayers should talk about who is willing to underwrite the run, and what those underwriters have said and done when the cameras were off.
The Free Beacon’s review does not claim every donor committed a crime last month. It shows verified contributions, verified organizational histories, and a candidate whose public answers still lag the gravity of the network writing the checks.
Michigan voters can read a donor schedule. They should also read the footnotes that come with it.
