El-Sayed Campaign Worker Among 12 Charged in Anti-Jewish Terror Plot

A former paid staffer on Abdul El-Sayed’s U.S. Senate campaign is among twelve people charged in a federal conspiracy to threaten University of Michigan leaders and terrorize the state’s Jewish community, according to a superseding indictment unsealed by federal prosecutors. Mariam Odeh, 24, is a Dearborn native. She worked for the Michigan Democrat’s campaign as recently as April. Prosecutors first charged her in June, and the 63-page indictment lists her as the seventh defendant. Her case is now one of twelve, after the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Michigan announced four more defendants. U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon tied the charges to centuries of violence against Jews. “From Pharaoh to Hitler to Hamas, those who terrorize Jews have been the bad guys,” Gorgon said. “As Americans, our job is to fight the bad guys.” The indictment names Odeh as president of the campus anti-Israel group Students Allied for Freedom and Equality. Her lone charge is “conspiracy to transmit threats in interstate and foreign commerce.” It is a felony that carries a maximum of five years. Prosecutors allege the group spray-painted threats, broke windows, and threw glass jars filled with noxious chemicals into family homes. They marked victims’ homes with red handprints and red inverted triangles, a symbol the government says Hamas uses to mark targets for death, then posted photographs online with warnings such as “you cannot hide.” El-Sayed’s campaign paid Odeh $154 on March 3 and $593 on March 13, according to fundraising disclosures. Spokeswoman Roxie Richner said Odeh was an hourly employee for two weeks and had not been affiliated since April 15, though a pretrial services officer told a judge that Odeh reported “full-time employment for approximately four months.” El-Sayed has suggested the activists were charged over their politics. “It’s a lot more about what you’re advocating for that gets you indicted or not indicted, rather than what you did,” the candidate argued at a June campaign event. The case has shadowed a campaign in which the Democrat has struggled to reassure Jewish voters while fielding attacks over his ties to anti-Israel figures. Two of the four defendants added this week, Henry MacKeen-Shapiro and Aaron Vonbargen, were arrested, prosecutors said. Two others remain at large. The Detroit News, which endorsed former Rep. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, has cited the Democrat’s thin governing record and his removal of about 100 YouTube videos and old social media posts. In their final debate, Rogers asked El-Sayed whether he stood with America “or these terrorist groups overseas.”