A CNN anchor was in for the shock of her life.
Host Abby Phillip went to bat for Michigan Democrat Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, and a guest used CNN’s own reporting to prove her wrong on the spot.
And the exchange on CNN NewsNight exposed exactly how far the network will go to protect a far-left candidate who can’t keep his story straight.
What Happened on CNN NewsNight
During a recent segment of CNN NewsNight, host Abby Phillip flatly declared that El-Sayed “does not support defunding the police” after former Trump official Caroline Sunshine said El-Sayed “wants to defund the police.”
Sunshine pushed back, saying El-Sayed had supported defunding the police and was now trying to shift away from that position. Phillip wasn’t buying it.
Phillip doubled down, insisting “he has said that he doesn’t support defunding the police.” That’s when former New York City Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli stepped in and told her, “I also don’t mean to fact-check you, but CNN’s reporting is saying that he has called to defund the police, despite his own denials of doing so.”
Borelli wasn’t citing some right-wing outlet. He was citing CNN.
CNN’s Own Reporters Already Buried El-Sayed’s Denial
CNN’s own KFile review of El-Sayed’s media appearances found that he repeatedly endorsed defunding the police in 2020. “We do need to defund the police,” El-Sayed said in a 2020 radio interview, even while discussing how the slogan could undermine criminal justice reform efforts.
His interviews from 2020 and 2021 show him embracing the “defund the police” movement — not just uttering the phrase but supporting the key principle of reinvesting funds from the police into other public-sector spaces such as mental health and anti-poverty efforts.
Before launching his Senate campaign, El-Sayed deleted his entire X history, including numerous posts touting the “defund the police” movement. He then claimed he didn’t advocate for defunding the police.
El-Sayed told The Detroit News, “I want to be clear, I actually never, never called for defunding. My goal in that conversation was to help everybody to understand what we were talking about.” Then CNN’s Manu Raju played a clip of El-Sayed calling for defunding the police in a radio interview from 2020 and asked El-Sayed why he had claimed he never advocated for it.
El-Sayed’s answer was to complain about the word “defund.”
One of the deleted tweets, from June 2020, stated: “Most major US cities spend WAY TOO MUCH on police departments to police poverty & WAY TOO LITTLE on public schools, health departments, recreation departments, & housing to eliminate poverty. Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about.”
Just last week during an interview with CNN’s Kasie Hunt, El-Sayed was pressed on his old posts and shot back that he “deleted all the tweets, because I didn’t want them to be taken out of context like this.”
So he deleted them to prevent context from being applied to them. Got it.
Who Is Abdul El-Sayed and Why Does It Matter
Even in 2020, polling repeatedly showed that policies advocating to “defund the police” were extremely unpopular. A Fox News poll from July 2020 showed that 82% of surveyed Michigan registered voters had a favorable view of their local police. A 2021 Axios/Ipsos poll found that just 27% of respondents supported the “defund the police” movement, with 70% opposed.
That’s not a fringe position. That’s an overwhelming majority of voters, including the ones El-Sayed is now asking to send him to Washington, DC.
El-Sayed and his primary opponent were vying to replace retiring Senator Gary Peters (D-MI), for a seat Republicans are eager to flip. El-Sayed is part of the progressive wave flooding into the Democrat Party, sporting endorsements from progressive heavyweights like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
The Michigan Senate hopeful attended and spoke at six Democratic Socialists of America events between 2017 and 2020. Organizers affiliated with the socialist organization have described El-Sayed as “a longtime friend of Detroit DSA.”
But he insists he’s not a socialist. Just like he insists he never called to defund the police.
El-Sayed has told The Wall Street Journal that he is “not technically or practically DSA.” Rogers and national Republicans had signaled that they consider El-Sayed an easier opponent than his primary opponent. The National Republican Senatorial Committee went so far as to produce a digital ad emphasizing El-Sayed’s progressive credentials and endorsement from Sanders — a move many viewed as an effort to boost him into the general election.
Republicans aren’t wrong to see opportunity here. A candidate who deleted his own social media history, denied things that are on video, and draws his energy from the same corner of the party that torched its credibility on crime after 2020 is carrying serious weight into a general election.
Communities across Michigan watched what happened to cities that gutted their police departments after 2020. Fewer officers. Slower response times. Higher crime. Working families paid the price while politicians like El-Sayed were busy posting about the #Defund movement and then quietly deleting the evidence.
And Abby Phillip tried to tell viewers none of that happened.
The fact that her own network’s reporters had to correct her on-air says something about how the media covers candidates like El-Sayed. CNN’s KFile did real journalism on this. The anchor who hosts the primetime show either didn’t read it or chose not to apply it. Either way, Borelli did the job Phillip wouldn’t.
El-Sayed now heads into a general election against Republican Mike Rogers in one of the most closely watched Senate races of the 2026 cycle. His record is documented. His denials are on video being contradicted by other video. And the network that’s supposed to be holding him accountable just got caught covering for him instead.
That’s not a media failure. That’s a choice.
Sources: Breitbart, CNN KFile, Daily Signal, Fox News, Bridge Michigan, Yahoo News/Fox News Digital, NBC News
