Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed told a Detroit audience in 2016 that he has "dual citizenship" in the United States and Egypt, according to previously unreported video. It's the second time he's been documented making the claim, even though his campaign now claims he was never a dual citizen.
El-Sayed made the remark about his dual citizenship onstage at a GlobeMed conference in Detroit, where the far-left Democrat served as the city's health director at the time.
"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," said El-Sayed, whose parents emigrated from Egypt to the Detroit area in 1978.
El-Sayed went on to tell a story, one he still tells on the campaign trail a decade later, that he was questioned by Egyptian police during one of those summer visits for publicly cursing Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president at the time.
The newly revealed 2016 video marks at least the second time El-Sayed has publicly claimed to have Egyptian status. His academic résumé stated in 2014 that he was a citizen of the United States and Egypt, the Washington Free Beacon previously reported.
El-Sayed's campaign told the Free Beacon, which reported in January on the dual citizenship claim made on his résumé, that El-Sayed was mistaken about his citizenship status.
"Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been," campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Free Beacon. Richner said that 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." But that person, whom the campaign has not identified, was wrong, according to Richner.
"This was an error based on what he was told by family members secondhand," said Richner. "When he tried to verify this later on in life, he and his family were unable to find any documentation to verify this claim."
In 2014, El-Sayed was working as a public health scholar, and false statements on a résumé, including ones about ethnic identity, are considered a grave offense in academia.
El-Sayed's campaign did not respond to questions about his 2016 statement. The Democrat has repeatedly attacked his Republican rival, Mike Rogers, for owning a home in Florida.
Born in Michigan in 1984, El-Sayed has said his father, an engineering professor at Eastern Michigan University, left Egypt to pursue his academic studies and because he was a "democracy agitator" who had run afoul of Egyptian authorities.
El-Sayed's biological mother, who divorced his father when El-Sayed was three years old, settled in Missouri and works in the health care field. She worked for years at a nonprofit group, the Islamic American Relief Agency, that was sanctioned in 2004 for funneling money to al Qaeda.
El-Sayed has expressed mixed feelings about his ancestral homeland. He has criticized secular Egyptian presidents like Mubarak and Abdel el-Sisi, while praising its Islamist leaders. In 2012, he signed an open letter alongside "leaders of the Egyptian community" that urged the repressive Muslim Brotherhood and then-president Mohamed Morsi to "purge the media and police" in order to solidify the Islamist group's power.
El-Sayed has referred to Bassem Youssef, an antisemitic pundit who claims Israel was behind 9/11, as a "fellow Egyptian."
"He's hilarious," El-Sayed said of Youssef.
The candidate has faced other questions about his foreign ties. According to his financial disclosure, El-Sayed owns rental property in the United Arab Emirates and has an outstanding debt to an Emirati developer behind a "resort-style" community that boasts "a stunning lagoon and white sandy beaches."
