Abdul El-Sayed has built his entire Senate run around one thing: his personal story.
Personal stories make for great stump speeches. But old conference videos have a funny way of sticking around long after the applause dies down.
And one clip from 2016 just forced El-Sayed’s own campaign to admit their candidate told an audience something that wasn’t true.
The 2016 Clip That Came Back Around
El-Sayed won the Democrat nomination for Michigan’s open US Senate seat in the August 4, 2026 primary. He squeaked past US Representative Haley Stevens (D-MI) by roughly one percentage point, according to Axios, and now faces former Republican Congressman Mike Rogers for the seat US Senator Gary Peters (D-MI) currently holds.
That kind of margin doesn’t leave a lot of room for surprises.
Then the Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross went digging. He turned up footage of El-Sayed speaking at a Detroit GlobeMed conference in 2016, and Mediaite picked up the story soon after.
“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,” El-Sayed told the crowd.
He followed that line with a tale he still tells voters a decade later. According to the Free Beacon, El-Sayed says Egyptian police questioned him during one of those summer visits after he publicly cursed Hosni Mubarak, the man who ran Egypt at the time.
It’s a good story. Folks in a campaign audience eat that stuff up.
But the dual citizenship part is the problem. And this isn’t the first time it surfaced.
The Free Beacon reported that an academic résumé El-Sayed published in 2014 listed his citizenships as “USA, Egypt.” That résumé lived on the networking site Academia right up until the Free Beacon sent it to his campaign. Then it disappeared.
Blame It on Grandpa
Campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner didn’t mince words when the Free Beacon came calling.
“Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been,” Richner said.
So who told the story for all those years? According to Richner, 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.”
“This was an error based on what he was told by family members secondhand,” she added.
Richner said that when El-Sayed tried to verify the claim later in life, he and his family couldn’t find any paperwork to back it up. She didn’t answer when the Free Beacon asked exactly when and how El-Sayed figured out he wasn’t an Egyptian citizen after all.
And that’s the question hanging over the whole thing.
Plenty of Americans hold dual citizenship lawfully, and nobody should treat that alone as a scandal. The issue here is simpler. El-Sayed put the claim on his résumé. He said it out loud to a room full of people. He built part of his life story on it. And now his own team says it never happened.
The Free Beacon also reported there’s reason to believe El-Sayed would have known he wasn’t a dual national by the time he taught at Columbia University. His campaign hasn’t offered a timeline that clears that up.
For a man whose entire career rests on public health research, checking his own records doesn’t seem like too tall an order.
The Physician Question Never Went Away
This isn’t the only credential El-Sayed has had trouble with.
His primary opponents hammered him for calling himself a physician. In July, Mehdi Hasan pressed him on it, pointing out that El-Sayed doesn’t hold a valid state medical license in New York or Michigan, which Hasan said is what someone legally needs to use that title.
El-Sayed brushed it off.
“You know, at the end of the day, it’s not about whether or not I’m a physician or a doctor. The question is, can you see a doctor?” he said.
Hasan wasn’t buying it. He told El-Sayed that people would want to know “did you tell the truth?”
El-Sayed pivoted to his résumé again. “Well, I would say that I was the health director for the city of Detroit, and I’ve done more to provide more people health care and eliminate medical debt than most doctors have done in their practice career,” he said.
Notice what he didn’t say. He never answered the question.
And that matters more than it might seem. El-Sayed ran on Medicare for All, according to Ground News coverage of the primary. When a candidate wants Washington, DC to take over the doctor’s office for every family in Michigan, the medical credentials he flashes on the trail aren’t a side issue. They’re the sales pitch.
Government-run healthcare puts bureaucrats between patients and the folks who actually treat them. Voters deserve to know exactly who’s selling them that plan and whether his own bio holds up.
Schumer Closed Ranks Anyway
Here’s where it gets interesting.
US Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) didn’t want El-Sayed. CBS News reported that Schumer recruited Stevens for the race. El-Sayed spent the primary returning the favor, telling audiences, “If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m dangerous.”
But the moment El-Sayed won, Schumer fell right in line. On August 5, 2026, he and US Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who chairs the Democrat Senatorial Campaign Committee, put out a joint statement backing him.
“We look forward to working with Abdul and Democrats across Michigan to win this seat in November,” the two said, according to Just the News.
No hesitation. No vetting. No questions about the résumé.
That’s how the Democrat Party machine operates. Party bosses can spend months trying to stop a candidate from their left flank, then embrace him within hours once he wins. Whatever principles they claimed during the primary vanish the second a Senate majority comes into view.
It’s worth wondering how many more old clips are sitting on a hard drive somewhere. El-Sayed’s political career stretches back to his 2018 run for governor, and he’s spoken at a lot of conferences since. The Free Beacon has now found the dual citizenship claim in two separate places years apart.
Maybe there’s nothing else out there. Maybe this is the last of it.
But El-Sayed’s response to Hasan suggests a pattern worth watching. When somebody asks about the gap between what he said and what’s true, he changes the subject. On the physician question, he told Hasan, “So I’m just not spending time on that.”
Michigan voters will decide in November how much time they want to spend on it. Either way, El-Sayed’s campaign now has to explain why its candidate’s own story kept shifting under his feet.
Sources:
“Unearthed Video Shows El-Sayed Claiming He’s a ‘Dual’ Citizen, Which His Campaign Says Isn’t True,” Mediaite
“Michigan Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed Identified Himself as an Egyptian Citizen When He Became a Columbia Professor. Now His Campaign Says He ‘Made a Mistake.’,” Washington Free Beacon
“Abdul El-Sayed wins Democratic Senate primary in battleground Michigan,” Axios
“Abdul El-Sayed projected to win Michigan Democratic Senate primary, defeating Haley Stevens,” CBS News
“Schumer backs El-Sayed after progressive wins Dem nomination in Michigan Senate primary,” Just the News
“Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan Senate primary in major victory for Democrats’ progressive wing,” Ground News
“Michigan’s Democratic US Senate primary called for Abdul El-Sayed,” WDIO
