Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee deleted old social media posts about Sept. 11 as the country heads into the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
Abdul El-Sayed is the party’s candidate against Republican Mike Rogers. He is a former state health official who won the Democratic primary.
CBS News verified two removed posts that had not been widely reported before Monday.
In April 2020, he compared the COVID death toll to the nearly 3,000 people killed on 9/11 and said he hoped America would spend a decade on “a war for public health & against poverty” the way it launched a “global #WaronTerror.”
On Sept. 11, 2021 — the 20th anniversary of the attack — he wrote that he mourned the “3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith.”
The next sentence was the one that landed hardest: “Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country.”
The New York Post reported that line as a tweet trashing America on the anniversary itself.
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El-Sayed’s campaign told CBS News that the posts were part of a broader wipe of material older than July 2023 “to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context.”
A representative said El-Sayed “has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks” and accused Rogers of “bad-faith lies.”
In his 2020 book, El-Sayed called the hijackings “craven terrorist attacks.” In April he said on Fox & Friends, “Of course I don’t think 9/11 was justified.”
Rogers has tied El-Sayed to Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who said in 2019 that “America deserved 9/11” and later walked the line back.
El-Sayed campaigned with Piker during the primary and has refused a clean break.
“I am not interested in a conversation about a social media person in California,” he told reporters over the weekend, the New York Post reported.
Several Democrats, including Sen. John Fetterman and Rep. Brad Schneider, have told him to disavow Piker. El-Sayed has not.
Deleting the anniversary post does not rewrite it. He put America’s war dead and the 9/11 dead on the same moral scale, then took the words down when a Senate race made them expensive.
That is not a conversion story.
It is a cleanup.
Voters can read the archived sentences and decide whether the candidate who wrote them on a September morning still thinks that way.
The campaign would rather they never see them at all.
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