It took Kristen Welker three tries on NBC's Meet the Press, and each time Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed gave her the same word. Did he have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood? "No." Did his family? "No." Then he changed the subject.
"Can you set the record straight about whether you or your family have any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood?" — "No."
El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee, says the question itself is the attack. His Republican opponent Mike Rogers, he told Welker, is only bringing it up because he wants to attack him for being Muslim: "The only reason he said those things is because he really wanted to repeat the word Muslim."
His half-sister posted something very different years earlier. Eman Abdelhadi, a professor at the University of Chicago, wrote in 2012: "My family has long been MB, but I've always felt that it has navigated the political sphere poorly/destructively." In July 2013 she wrote: "I have had family jailed for being a part of it." And a June 2012 post described "an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college" in Egypt.
Eman Abdelhadi's posts from 2012 and 2013, still public on her account.
El-Sayed and Abdelhadi share the same mother, Fatten Fathy Elkomy. After their parents divorced, El-Sayed mostly lived with his father while Abdelhadi lived with their mother. Her posts are still public today — the 2012 post about her mother's activism and a 2013 post praying for family who support the Brotherhood in Egypt — and screenshots of the full set were shared by the reporter who surfaced them.
Republicans are making sure Michigan sees all of it. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has spotlighted Ikhwan Online — the Brotherhood's official website — celebrating El-Sayed's primary victory under a translated headline, "Abdul Rahman al-Sayyid conquers the Zionists and runs for the Senate," and Rogers is pressing the family question in the campaign's closing stretch.
To be precise about what the posts do and do not show: they do not by themselves prove El-Sayed himself was a member, and favorable coverage on the group's website is not proof of coordination. What they contradict is the claim he made on national television — that his family has no ties to the group. The stakes are higher since January, when the Treasury Department designated the Brotherhood's Egyptian and Jordanian branches as Specially Designated Global Terrorists and the State Department designated the Lebanese branch a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
El-Sayed has explained, at length, why he believes Rogers is attacking his faith. He has not yet explained the posts.
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