Far-left Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, the Bernie Sanders– and AOC-backed nominee for U.S. Senate, is on video telling a Detroit audience he carries dual citizenship in the United States and Egypt, the second time he has been documented claiming Egyptian citizenship, even as his campaign insists he never held it.
The Washington Free Beacon published the previously unreported footage on Monday. El-Sayed made the remarks onstage at a 2016 GlobeMed conference in Detroit, while he was the city’s health director.
“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 told the crowd, according to the Free Beacon. You Need If You Have Wrinkles
His parents emigrated from Egypt to the Detroit area in 1978. El-Sayed was born in Michigan. In the same speech he retold a story he still uses on the campaign trail: Egyptian police questioned him during a summer visit after he publicly cursed then-President Hosni Mubarak.
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This is the second documented claim.
In January, the Free Beacon reported that a résumé El-Sayed posted while he was an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health listed his citizenships as “USA, Egypt.” The résumé disappeared from the academic site Academia after the outlet sent it to the campaign.
Campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Free Beacon then: “Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been.”
Her explanation: El-Sayed was “told as a child that his grandfather had pursued Egyptian citizenship on his behalf, for which he was eligible due to his parents being born in Egypt.” She called it “an error based on what he was told by family members secondhand,” and said that when he later tried to check, “he and his family were unable to find any documentation to verify this claim.”
The Free Beacon reported that the campaign did not answer questions about the separate 2016 video. The campaign has also declined to say when, exactly, El-Sayed decided the childhood story was wrong, even though he was still describing himself as a dual citizen on a public stage in 2016, two years after the résumé.
Michigan voters are now being asked to send this man to the United States Senate.
El-Sayed narrowly beat Rep. Haley Stevens in the August Democratic primary after a race he and his allies framed as a fight against AIPAC and “foreign” money.
He launched with an endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders and has been backed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rep. Rashida Tlaib. He is the Democratic nominee to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters and faces Trump-endorsed Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers in November. Control of the Senate is on the line.
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