Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed is facing renewed scrutiny after several of his deleted social media posts about September 11th resurfaced ahead of the tragedy’s 25th anniversary. The posts compared the nearly 3,000 Americans murdered on 9/11 with deaths from COVID-19 and U.S. military operations overseas. Their reappearance gives Republicans fresh ammunition as El-Sayed battles former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers for a crucial Senate seat.
The controversy erupted after CBS News examined El-Sayed’s past remarks and verified two previously unreported posts that had been deleted. El-Sayed, a former public health official, won the Democratic nomination as a progressive critic of American military intervention. His campaign now faces the uphill battle of explaining comments aimed at a more activist audience as he attempts to win over Michigan’s broader general-election electorate.
CBS published the available language from one of El-Sayed’s deleted COVID-era posts directly. El-Sayed wrote, “that means we’ll spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty … like we launched a global #WaronTerror after 9/11.” He finished the post by writing, “We could save lives rather than take them.”
A separate deleted post from September 11th, 2021, produced another controversy. As Trending Politics reported, El-Sayed wrote, “Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith.” He continued, “Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.”
El-Sayed’s campaign previously said it removed every social media post predating July 2023, though it did not disclose when the deletions occurred. The campaign said the mass deletion was performed “to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context.” “Abdul has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks,” a campaign spokesperson told CBS News. The spokesperson added, “Mike Rogers’ attempts to misrepresent Abdul’s beliefs are bad-faith lies meant to mislead Michiganders.”
El-Sayed addressed the posts after a CBS Detroit reporter confronted him on the campaign trail. “I think all of us look back and say 9/11 was an awful thing that happened in this country, and I think all of us also look back and say, think about all the wars that were fought and how much safer do we feel like they made us?” he said. El-Sayed continued, “My point is just to say that what happened on 9/11 is a disaster. It was a terrible attack on our country and our responsibility is also to think about how do we build an America where we are protecting our servicemen and women from being asked to fight wars we have no business fighting that ultimately end up doing harm to people.”
Several progressive politicians and commentators responded by attacking CBS News for publishing the report. According to Fox News Digital, Piker called the report’s headline “insane,” while former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan asked CBS if it was “super offensive and disgusting and Islamophobic” to connect the potential first Muslim Democratic senator with September 11th. Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-AZ) called the headline “blatantly racist,” while Bulwark host Tim Miller described the report as “despicable anti-Muslim woke right garbage.”
"*" indicates required fields
A CBS News source pushed back on the criticism, saying reports about politicians’ deleted social media posts are published “all the time.” Michigan political consultant Adrian Hemond said El-Sayed has what he called a “‘Quacks like a duck problem,’” explaining, “There’s enough quacking going on, sort of directionally, that it has raised questions for a lot of people, and he hasn’t done a very good job addressing those questions.” Michigan State University political scientist Matt Grossmann said a single post may not decide the election, but added, “Does the general impression that he might be too extreme […] will that make a difference? That has a bigger chance of doing so.”
Watch Abdul get scorched on live TV by Jesse Watters here: