Claim tying Michigan Senate candidate to Muslim Brotherhood rests on disputed 2012 letter
A Guardian review published on Oct. 29, 2026, found that the Republican campaign's effort to cast Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as an Islamic extremist rests on a false claim. That claim was first made eight years ago by Laura Loomer, an influential outside adviser to Donald Trump.
El-Sayed is running in Michigan against Mike Rogers, a former congressman who is the Republican candidate. The dispute centres on a 2012 open letter that El-Sayed signed, along with more than 30 others, in support of democracy in Egypt. Loomer has said since 2018, when El-Sayed entered politics, that the letter amounted to a public endorsement of the Muslim Brotherhood. She has described herself as "a proud Islamophobe."
The letter was published only in Arabic, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring uprising that toppled Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. It urged Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's first elected president, to defend the country's young democracy. Morsi was a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and secular activists had supported him. According to the Guardian review, the text of the letter does not mention the Muslim Brotherhood and is not a pledge of support for the group.
Rogers opened his campaign against El-Sayed in August 2026 by repeating Loomer's account, saying El-Sayed had "pledged his support to the Muslim Brotherhood." Loomer has also claimed on X that El-Sayed pledged his support to Morsi.
In the days before Oct. 29, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also amplified the account of the letter in their remarks. At a campaign event outside Detroit, Cruz called El-Sayed a "jihadist leprechaun" and tried to tie him to the Muslim Brotherhood. Cruz also said El-Sayed might help terrorists evade U.S. detection if he gained access to classified material.
About two weeks before Oct. 29, El-Sayed was asked whether he would "disavow the Muslim Brotherhood." He replied, "Sure, yeah, absolutely," and compared the fearmongering about his faith to the fears about John F. Kennedy's Catholicism in 1960.
In Michigan's final Senate debate in the week before Oct. 29, Rogers said El-Sayed was so "passionate about defunding the police" that he had asked Egypt's leader to defund the police there too.
