Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed denied family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood on national TV, even as his half-sister’s older posts said the family “has long been MB.”
Abdul El-Sayed sat for a Meet the Press interview and gave a flat answer when asked about the Muslim Brotherhood. Kristen Welker pressed him on whether he or his family had any ties. He said “No,” then said it again.
Those denials sit uneasily beside social media posts written years earlier by Eman Abdelhadi, described as his half-sister and an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. The Washington Free Beacon reported that Abdelhadi wrote in 2012 and 2013 that her family “has long been MB” and that relatives had been “jailed for being a part of it.”
The posts, and El-Sayed’s television answers, have become part of a larger fight in Michigan’s Senate race over associations, accountability, and what voters are owed when a candidate’s record is tested in public.
On June 24, 2012, Abdelhadi wrote that her family had long been part of the group known as the MB, short for Muslim Brotherhood.
Attribution in the Free Beacon account places the line in her own words:
"My family has long been MB,"
The same day, she described asking an aunt visiting the United States about the Brotherhood and said she was surprised by what she heard about civil liberties, women, and religious minorities.
In July 2013, the posts grew more personal. Abdelhadi wrote that she had family jailed for membership and offered a prayer for relatives supporting the Brotherhood in Egypt.
"I have had family jailed for being a part of it,"
"Praying for all my family that supports the #MB in Egypt. Lie low, stay safe"
Two days later she added that conversations with her “#MB family” in Egypt showed respect for individual liberties and a secular state. The Free Beacon account presents the posts as her writing from that period, with links to the messages on X.
Abdelhadi and El-Sayed share a mother, Fatten Elkomy, who emigrated from Egypt in the late 1970s. After a mid-1980s divorce from El-Sayed’s father, Elkomy married Abdelhadi’s father, who is Palestinian. That shared maternal line is the bridge the reporting uses to treat Abdelhadi’s “family” references as relevant to El-Sayed’s denial.
Which specific relatives she meant, and whether El-Sayed ever met them, is not settled in the available account. The contradiction is plain on the page: a national TV denial of family ties, and a sister’s earlier claim that the family had long been inside the Brotherhood.
Welker’s question was direct.
"You don’t have any ties, and your family doesn’t?"
El-Sayed’s answer, reported as given twice, was “No.” The appearance was described as airing on a Sunday. His campaign did not immediately respond when asked for comment on the posts.
The denial did not arrive in a vacuum. In the prior week’s Senate debate, Republican candidate Mike Rogers tied El-Sayed to Brotherhood-aligned circles.
"He's so close to the people who are supporting the Muslim Brotherhood,"
Rogers’s line tracked a wider argument already running through the race, including coverage of how El-Sayed has taken thousands from donors tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and what those ties mean for a candidate seeking a six-year term.
On Fox News last week, host Martha MacCallum pressed him as well. She noted that senior Egyptian Brotherhood leaders called for violent attacks after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas assault on Israel. El-Sayed answered with a general formula rather than a straight vote position on designation.
"Any organization engaged in political violence or calling for political violence is engaged in terrorism,"
He has also faced questions about dual citizenship claims and about how he frames foreign threats, including a record of putting Israel and Iran on equal footing as U.S. threats in the same Michigan contest.
Fatten Elkomy once worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency. In 2004, the U.S. Treasury Department named IARA a specially designated terrorist organization for providing financial and logistical support to terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda and Hamas.
Court documents filed by U.S. officials named Elkomy more than a dozen times in connection with cash transfers, according to the Free Beacon report. That paper trail does not by itself prove Brotherhood membership. It does show a mother who appears repeatedly in a terror-finance case file tied to an agency the government shut down for supporting jihadist networks.
El-Sayed has written and spoken about childhood summers in Egypt. His father, an engineering professor at Eastern Michigan University, emigrated in 1978. El-Sayed has said his father left partly over “political agitation” against a military dictatorship and partly because he believed he could practice his religion more freely in America. After the divorce, El-Sayed lived with his father.
Abdelhadi has described their mother as insistent on Arab roots, including a refusal to speak English with the children or answer them if they used it. Voters weighing a Senate bid can hold that family history next to the candidate’s clean “No” on television and decide what adds up. Separate reporting has also examined how El-Sayed claimed dual U.S.-Egypt citizenship on video while running statewide.
El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, has served on the board of the Islamic Society of North America. The Free Beacon describes ISNA as the public face of the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States and notes that ISNA was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial.
That board seat is another proximity fact, not a membership card. It still lands in the same file as the sister’s posts, the mother’s IARA trail, and the candidate’s refusal to own any family link on national television. Related coverage has detailed how El-Sayed’s father-in-law bankrolled his super PAC while leading Muslim Brotherhood-linked organizations.
In 2012, after Mohamed Morsi won Egypt’s presidency, El-Sayed signed an open letter with other Egyptian-American leaders that called on the Muslim Brotherhood to “purge the media and police.” The letter’s full text is not reproduced in the Free Beacon piece beyond that phrase. The signature is hard to square with a later posture that treats any Brotherhood discussion as alien to his household.
The Muslim Brotherhood was formed in Egypt in 1928. Reporting in the same account states that the group spawned Hamas in Gaza in the 1980s, that roughly 2 percent of Egyptians are members, and that about one-third of Egyptians view the group favorably. In January, the Trump administration designated the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization over its plans to help Hamas. A bipartisan Senate group led by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has pushed legislation to designate the entire organization.
El-Sayed has ducked a clear yes-or-no on whether he would vote for that designation. A candidate who wants the job of writing federal law does not get to answer terror questions with slogans alone.
Abdelhadi was arrested for assaulting a police officer at an anti-ICE protest in Chicago last year, the Free Beacon reported. She remains a University of Chicago assistant professor. Her old posts are not erased by her academic title or by the candidate’s preferred talking points.
Open questions remain. The Free Beacon account does not identify which maternal relatives were Brotherhood members, whether El-Sayed met them, or whether any Brotherhood tie runs through his father’s side. Absolute calendar dates for the Sunday Meet the Press taping, the prior week’s debate, and the Fox interview are given only in relative terms. The campaign’s “did not immediately respond” is not a substantive reply.
Even so, the core collision needs no embroidery. A half-sister wrote that the family had long been MB and that relatives were jailed for it. On national television, the Senate candidate said he and his family had no ties. Michigan voters have watched other gaps in his public story, including a bid in which El-Sayed has run as a physician without a medical license.
Family history is not a crime. Neither is a harsh old tweet. What wears thin is a polished denial that never grapples with the paper and posts already in public view, Treasury files, an open letter, a father-in-law’s board seat, and a sister who said the quiet part out loud more than a decade ago.
Senate candidates who want the public’s trust should answer straight questions with straight facts, not hope old family posts stay buried.
