Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed once put his name on a letter cheering Egypt’s president — who was a senior Muslim Brotherhood figure — and urged him to “purge the media and the police,” according to a report from the Washington Free Beacon.
The explosive document was also reported in April by conservative firebrand Laura Loomer.
The Arabic-language statement ran on the Egyptian news site Al-Ahram Gate in November 2012, just days after then-President Mohamed Morsi grabbed sweeping new powers for himself. Forty-six self-described leaders of the Egyptian-American community signed on, hailing Morsi’s moves as “revolutionary” and blasting critics who wanted the United States and Europe to step in.
Signature No. 33 was “Dr. Abdul Rahman El-Sayed” of New York, back when the future politician was a medical student at Columbia. Sources who follow Arabic-language media told the Free Beacon it’s the same man now running for Senate.
His campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Morsi’s power play was slammed at the time, with one liberal Egyptian lawmaker branding it outright tyranny and even Human Rights Watch warning it gutted the rule of law.
The purge followed after that. Over the next several months, reporters were hauled into court for allegedly insulting Islam and the president, and critical coverage vanished from Egyptian websites, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Morsi didn’t last. The military toppled him in 2013, and Egypt banned the Brotherhood and designated it a terror group.
But as the Free Beacon notes, that letter wasn’t the first time El-Sayed championed the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2011 pieces for the Huffington Post and the Guardian, El-Sayed told Americans not to worry about a Brotherhood takeover, insisting it would look nothing like Iran or Hamas.
El-Sayed’s father-in-law helps lead an Islamic group that federal officials have linked to the Brotherhood and is a top donor to a super PAC boosting his son-in-law’s campaign.
“This should raise serious questions,” Mariam Wahba of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told the Free Beacon about the 2012 letter and El-Sayed’s past support for the Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood’s rap sheet is long and bloody.
A 2025 Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) research memo called the group a “gateway” to terrorism, one that feeds radical ideas to members who later split off to carry out violence. Hamas calls itself the Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing in its own original charter.
“In Egypt, the Brotherhood’s original branch gave rise to Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), which assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981 after he made peace with Israel,” FDD noted. “In 1993, Brotherhood alumnus Ayman al-Zawahiri took the reins of EIJ and merged it into al-Qaeda.”
The carnage isn’t ancient history. In Jordan, authorities in 2025 busted Brotherhood-linked cells that were reportedly making rockets and drones, then banned the group entirely. In Lebanon, the local affiliate took credit for multiple rocket attacks on northern Israel alongside Hezbollah.
In Yemen, a co-founder of the Brotherhood-aligned Islah party was blacklisted by the Treasury Department over his ties to Osama bin Laden. In the United States, Brotherhood affiliates have been convicted of bankrolling Hamas and al-Qaeda, FDD notes.
The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy identified four primary arenas where the Muslim Brotherhood tries to gain entry: influencing government and politics, targeting colleges and students, using the legal system, and controlling the media and storyline.
Washington is finally cracking down. The Treasury Department slapped terror designations on the Brotherhood’s Egyptian and Jordanian branches in January, as The Daily Wire reported. In July, the Trump administration sanctioned a top Egyptian Brotherhood official accused of supporting fundraising for Hamas-linked institutions that OFAC had already sanctioned and of working with Brotherhood groups to give Hamas financial help.
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