While the left-wing insurgent candidate in Michigan’s Senate primary, Abdul El-Sayed, has tried to scrub the internet of his attacks on the police, his communications director hasn’t even gone that far.
A longtime aide to the left-wing Democrat, Roxie Richner, defended the looting of American cities in 2020 and shared social media posts calling to defund systemically "racist" police departments, lashing out at "white Ann Arbor" people who pressed her on those views.
Richner worked on El-Sayed's failed 2018 gubernatorial campaign, starting as a high school intern before managing the campaign's volunteer program. Richner and El-Sayed kept in touch after the campaign ended, appearing together on a health care panel in the summer of 2020, a time when Richner was defending the rioting and looting of American cities and calling to defund the police.
"let's be very clear. the police are instigating violence across the country. people are responding. that's what's happening," Richner posted to X on June 1, 2020. A few days earlier she shared a post which read, "People are really upset about stolen goods when America exists because of theft. Stolen land, stolen Black bodies, stolen labor and stolen wages."
Some of her followers apparently took issue, prompting Richner to threaten to expose them.
"if one more white ann arbor person dms me asking why i’m ‘dEFeNdiNG LoOtiNG’ i’m seriously gonna explode. your racism is showing. check yourselves. I’m not holding back on this shit anymore, i’m dropping names if u keep it up," Richner wrote on X on June 3, 2020.
Richner also boosted social media posts arguing that racism is "a systemic virus plaguing police departments across the US," that the New York City and Los Angeles police departments are "the biggest gangs in America," and that "Racist violence and police murder are inherent to capitalism."
Richner’s posts add a new layer to her boss’s history of denouncing law enforcement and calling to defund the police—rhetoric El-Sayed has sought to distance himself from amid a competitive Democratic primary race against state senator Mallory McMorrow and Rep. Haley Stevens.
"Roxie’s tweets pulled from six years ago have no logical relation to her work with or support for Abdul," Sophie Pollock, senior communications adviser for El-Sayed’s campaign, told the Washington Free Beacon. "She is an extremely valued member of our team and this is clearly nothing more than any [sic] attempt to use staff to smear Abdul."
Richner, however, has argued that social media posts shouldn't get a pass just because of when they were posted.
El-Sayed has deleted tweets describing police departments as "standing armies" and suggesting that left-wing activists should rebrand the "#defund" movement to the "#REfund" movement and "demand a refund on all tax dollars to fund military police & brutality." Richner shared the latter post to X.
El-Sayed also served on the boards of the far-left groups Sunrise Movement—which lobbied to "defund and abolish the police" and described cops as "fascist pigs"—and Michigan United—which organized a deadly BLM protest in Detroit—throughout 2020. He now says he "actually never, never called for defunding."
When El-Sayed sat on the Sunrise Movement board, the group often condemned police for working to "protect," "uphold," and "enforce" America's "white supremacist society" and "white supremacist institutions." Richner disparaged white people in her own posts, writing on May 26, 2020, "all white women are policy failures." On the same day, Richner called on her followers to engage in a "powerful anti-racist act" by having "tough conversations" with white family members.
"fellow white people: one of the most powerful anti-racist acts is having those tough conversations with your loved ones. I make it a point to speak with my family about dismantling white supremacy almost every day," Richner wrote. "Black people are being murdered by the police and white women are making shit up trying to get Black people killed. snap tf out of it and start taking action."
Another post Richner shared was written by anti-racist activist Ibram X. Kendi, who blamed law enforcement for the "violent rebellions of Black people."
"Police violence has historically been the source of the violent rebellions of Black people and their allies," Kendi said. "Police violence begets violent resistance. If you want to end the violent resistance, then end the police violence."
Richner joined El-Sayed’s Senate campaign in April 2025, according to her LinkedIn profile, but the two were already well acquainted. She told Vox that she discovered El-Sayed after his 2018 opponent, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer (D.), told her to wait until she’s older to get involved in politics.
"I was not really happy with that answer," Richner said. "So I went home and did all this research and found Abdul."
The two kept in touch in the years following that campaign. They shared a photo on Instagram in February 2020 highlighting their matching shoes, with El-Sayed describing Richner as "the boss." That June, Richner joined El-Sayed on a National Children’s Campaign panel and argued in favor of enacting Medicare for All, a central part of El-Sayed's Senate campaign platform.
Richner also appears to share El-Sayed’s hostility to Israel. In September 2023, she shared a post on X describing Israel as a "genocidal apartheid" state. On Oct. 4, 2024—just three days before the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack—she posted a photo on Instagram of a flyer reading "Divest From Genocide." At her 2024 Michigan State University graduation, Richner wore a sash patterned after the Palestinian keffiyeh.
El-Sayed, meanwhile, said on a private campaign call a day after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed that he wanted to avoid taking any public position on the assassination because "there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad" about Khamenei's death, the Free Beacon reported.
In early April, El-Sayed suggested the only reason U.S. lawmakers supported the "genocidal" war in Iran was because of money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He made the comments during a campaign stop that featured Hasan Piker, the far-left podcaster who has said, "America deserved 9/11," and argued that it "doesn't matter if rape happened" on Oct. 7. El-Sayed defended his decision to campaign with Piker, arguing in a Fox News interview that the influencer's comments need to be viewed in "context."
