Michigan voters will have to wait until the elections are over to know what Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed really thinks about the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks.
On Sept. 18, Wayne County received a Freedom of Information Act request for emails to or from the Senate hopeful from Oct. 5 to Nov. 1, 2023, containing Oct. 7-related keywords.
After a series of delays, the response deadline has been extended to Nov. 6.
The Federalist, the news organization that issued the request, reported that the initial request received a 10-day extension, followed by a $757.20 bill and a promise that the retrieval would take at least 75 days.
To the chagrin of the curious reporters, the county also closed the FOIA request.
In response to this pushback, The Federalist narrowed its request — only emails sent by El-Sayed between Oct. 7 and Oct. 15.
They even offered to remove a few keywords.
After the outlet called to discuss the modified request and request an expedited release, the county told the outlet to submit a new request.
The county also claimed another 10-day extension and set the Nov. 6 deadline — three days after the election.
Under Michigan law, FOIA gives anyone who submits a written request describing a record the right to inspect, copy, or receive public records. It allows certain delays and extensions, and it doesn’t define when public records must be made available.
The Wayne County government, where El-Sayed once worked, appears to be exploiting that legal ambiguity.
According to The Federalist, the county had already retrieved the original records, but refuses to pare them down to the narrowed request.
“The county doesn’t need another extension to look for records it found weeks ago. It would take just a few minutes to filter those search results to the nine days we requested,” the outlet said.
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For some reason or another, Wayne County has decided that these emails — to which they already have access — are best released a few days after the polls close.
We can’t know for sure what these emails contain, but they are certainly of interest to Jewish voters in Michigan.
The Israel-Hamas conflict has plagued El-Sayed’s campaign from the beginning.
Following the March 12 terrorist attack on the Temple Israel synagogue, El-Sayed found himself embroiled in controversy after attempting to contextualize the attack, saying that “hurt people, hurt people.”
MS NOW reported that El-Sayed’s remarks have driven Temple Israel teacher Elise Otis away from the Democratic candidate.
“He doesn’t stand for me and my family… I’m an American, and I don’t feel safe in our country,” she said.
“I am voting — very unhappily — for Rogers,” Otis said, adding: “If we vote for [El-Sayed], then we are setting a precedent for how we vote in the future, and if we are willing to accept blatant anti-Semitism, who will come out of the shadows in the future?”
Whatever the emails contain, Michigan voters will head to the polls Tuesday without seeing them.
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