Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed refused to publicly condemn the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, telling staffers in a leaked recording that he had to stay quiet because Dearborn’s Muslim voters were “sad” about it.
“I also want to remind you guys that there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today,” El-Sayed said, according to audio first reported by the Washington Free Beacon. “So, like, I just don’t want to comment on Khamenei at all. Like, I don’t think it’s worth even touching that.”
The recording came from a staff meeting where El-Sayed was working out messaging. His plan if pressed by reporters: go on offense about Trump instead. “I’m just gonna go straight to pedophilia, frankly,” he was recorded saying. “I’ll just be like, ‘Pedophile president decides that he doesn’t like the front page news, so he decides to take us into another war.'”
El-Sayed’s campaign lawyers at the Sandler Reiff law firm pushed back on the recording’s legitimacy. They told the Free Beacon it was “obtained without the campaign’s permission” and without those present knowing they were being recorded. “The campaign is considering its legal options against the individual in question,” the lawyers said.
El-Sayed is running with the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders. He faces Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens in the Aug. 4 primary to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters. The Cook Political Report currently rates the general election a toss-up.
The leaked audio adds a new dimension to those concerns. El-Sayed did not weigh whether condemning a dead terrorist leader was the right thing to do. His calculus, according to the recording, was purely about which voters in Dearborn might react badly. The politics came first. The question of what a U.S. senator should say about the death of the world’s most prominent state sponsor of terrorism did not appear to enter the room.
