Abdul El-Sayed has a citizenship problem — and it's his own words causing it.
A resurfaced 2016 video shows the Michigan Senate candidate telling a Detroit audience that he carried "dual citizenship" in the United States and Egypt, according to the post. Now, with the video circulating, his campaign is disputing the claim — saying El-Sayed was never actually a dual citizen and that the earlier statement was based on incorrect information about his family's citizenship status.
The conflicting accounts are raising obvious questions: what did El-Sayed understand his citizenship status to be when he made the statement — and why is this resurfacing now, in the middle of a Senate campaign?
The timing is brutal. El-Sayed is running in one of the most watched Senate races in the country, and he's already been taking fire over his association with controversial streamer Hasan Piker. Now he's got a second front: a video of himself making a claim about his own citizenship that his own campaign says wasn't true.
His defenders will say it was an honest mistake — a man repeating what he believed about his family's history. His critics will ask a simpler question: if he was wrong about his own citizenship, what else is he wrong about?
For a candidate, there's no worse kind of story than one where you're contradicting yourself on tape. The video exists. The denial exists. And voters get to decide which one they believe.
The questions aren't going away — and with the election approaching, they're only getting louder.