Michigan's left-wing Democratic Senate candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, told staffers he wanted to avoid making a public statement about the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—or taking any public position on it at all—because "there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad" about his death, according to audio from a private campaign strategy call obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
If reporters pressed him to take a position, he said, he would change the subject to Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. "I'm just gonna go straight to pedophilia, frankly," El-Sayed said. "I'll just be like, 'Pedophile president decides that he doesn't like the front page news, so he decides to take us into another war.'"
His remarks came during a conference call with his communications team on March 1, during which the candidate and his communications team discussed his messaging on Operation Epic Fury. The previous day, Feb. 28, an Israeli airstrike killed the Iranian dictator, who, as president of Iran and then as the country's supreme leader starting in 1989, oversaw the murder and torture of political opponents inside Iran and deadly terrorist attacks against the country's enemies, including hundreds of Americans.
"I also want to remind you guys that there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today. So, like, I just don't want to comment on Khamenei at all. Like, I don't think it's worth even touching that," El-Sayed told his campaign team.
"We have the moral high ground here," the candidate said, adding that reporters would "try and bait us into saying, 'Yeah, but isn't it justified now that they took [Khamenei] out, right? And I just think, for us, we've got to be, like, 'no.'"
Dearborn has the largest Muslim population per capita of any city in the country and in 2023 became the nation's first Arab-majority city. Though heavily Democratic, Dearborn gave a plurality of its 2024 vote to President Donald Trump. Its mayor, Abdullah Hammoud (D.), has called for the destruction of Israel, said Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack was "inevitable," and falsely accused the Jewish state of bombing Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza.
El-Sayed is the most left-wing of the three major candidates in the hotly contested primary for Michigan's open Senate seat. State Sen. Mallory McMorrow—who in October said Israel's war against Hamas met "the definition" of genocide before lamenting that stance becoming a "political purity test"—also criticized the U.S.-Israeli operation against the Islamic Republic when it began.
"Instead of focusing resources to ensure Americans have access to healthcare, housing, jobs, safety and security in their own communities, this President has chosen a war overseas at the expense of everyone back home," she said.
Rep. Haley Stevens, the more moderate candidate in the race, instead said that "Iran's state sponsorship of terror across the globe has led to chaos and unchecked violence," but called for a congressional check on the president's military power.
El-Sayed also proposed pivoting away from questions about Khamenei by attacking Israel and American pro-Israel groups.
"You know what benefits [from the war]? It benefits Israel, who has captured too many of our politicians through AIPAC contributions," he said.
El-Sayed's advisers expressed discomfort with some of his messaging on Israel, telling the candidate that "Israel's issue always just makes me a little nervous."
El-Sayed defended the talking points, arguing that he needed to "take the whole shot"—that is, to accuse lawmakers of being tools both of AIPAC, an American lobbying organization, and of Israel.
"I can shade away from it, but if I'm going to take the shot, I can't just allude to it. I got to take the whole shot, which means that I'm going to say, 'Look, you've got AIPAC-backed congress people who now don't want to empower Congress to step up and enforce its own prerogative,'" said El-Sayed. "Ask yourself who that benefits and why? Ask yourself how powerful that force is in our politics if they won't even stand up to a president who's making illegal and unjustified war?"
Later in the call, El-Sayed predicted that someone named "Welch"—presumably left-wing influencer Jennifer Welch, who released a podcast episode with the candidate on March 4—was "going to bait me into the Israel stuff" in the upcoming interview.
"If I'm gonna take the shot, I gotta set it. I gotta set up the whole shot. That's the thing. ... Like, 'Look, I'm running against an AIPAC-backed Democratic congresswoman, and you know what her statement was, [she is] perfectly okay with this war,'" said El-Sayed.
In response to a request for comment, the Free Beacon received a note from the campaign's lawyers at the Sandler Reiff law firm in Washington, D.C.
"I write to inform you that the audio recording that you base the below questions on was obtained without the campaign's permission, and without knowledge that individuals were being recorded," wrote David Mitrani, a partner at the firm. "The campaign is considering its legal options against the individual in question. Given these circumstances, the campaign expects that you will take this into account in determining whether to proceed with any reporting on this matter."
El-Sayed has made his fervent opposition to Israel a cornerstone of his campaign. The Senate candidate was a featured speaker during an online progressive rally Saturday night that also included popular streamer Hasan Piker, who has said the United States "deserved 9/11" and who will appear with El-Sayed at rallies at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University on April 7.
When the left-wing streamer Vaush said he did not know how the "Democratic Party can survive" without making opposition to Israel a core tenet, El-Sayed jumped in.
"I think you hit the nail on the head," he said. "If this is not a legitimate space for conversation about where our tax dollars go in the aftermath of having subsidized genocide and now getting pulled into an absolutely insane war in Iran because Netanyahu finally found an American president stupid enough to take us there, then I don't know what is."
This is not the first time recordings of El-Sayed's campaign calls have made news.
A day after a Dearborn Heights resident who immigrated from Lebanon attacked a synagogue and preschool in West Bloomfield, Mich., El-Sayed released a lengthy video statement denouncing the attack but adding that the attacker "lost family, including two children, in an airstrike in Lebanon last week. They were innocent people." The attacker's brother was a Hezbollah commander, the Israel Defense Forces announced soon after the attack, though El-Sayed intimated in his statement that the Israeli strike caused the synagogue attack.
El-Sayed said on an organizing call after the fact that the statement was a "risk," though it was initially unclear whether he was referring to his condemnation of the attack or of Israel. That call was leaked to Punchbowl News. In a follow-up post on X, he said, "The 'risk' I took that these cowards will NEVER take is having the courage to call out an illegal and unjustified war that's killing children, wasting our tax dollars, and spiking gas prices, too."
El-Sayed has also made headlines for his views on other U.S. military engagements. He drew an equivalence between 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror in since-deleted posts on X and in a 2021 op-ed, arguing that both were "perpetrated ignorantly" and driven by "tribalistic grievance," the Free Beacon reported in December. He also boasted in his 2020 memoir that, as a college athlete, he refused to face the American flag during the national anthem over his opposition to the Iraq war.
