Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed dismissed as "hearsay" his sister's past social media posts describing their family's involvement in the Muslim Brotherhood, after being pressed on the issue in an NBC News interview.
The questions followed El-Sayed's appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," where host Kristen Welker asked whether he or his family had ties to the Islamist movement. "No, but let's talk about this," El-Sayed answered, and he again said "no" to follow-up questions about his family.
The next day, posts by his half-sister Eman Abdelhadi, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago, began circulating online after being highlighted by the Washington Free Beacon.
In a 2012 post, Abdelhadi wrote about "an amazing conversation with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood" while she was a college student in Egypt in the early 1970s. In another post, she wrote, "My family has long been MB," though she criticized how the movement had handled politics. In 2013, she wrote that relatives had been jailed over their membership in the Brotherhood and asked followers to pray for family members in Egypt who supported the group.
Confronted with the posts by NBC's Tom Llamas, El-Sayed pushed back. "You want to ask me about what was happening in Egypt in 1970? Are you serious?" he said. "I have never had these conversations with my mom."
"You're using hearsay evidence from a tweet. This is not serious," he added. "Are you insinuating that somehow I was lying?"
El-Sayed, who was born and raised in Michigan, said he was not raised by his mother, Fatten Elkomy, after his parents divorced when he was young.
