El-Sayed Caught on Video Saying He Has ‘Dual Citizenship’ Despite Campaign’s Denial

Michigan Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said he held dual citizenship during a 2016 speech in Detroit, contradicting his campaign’s current account that he has never been a citizen of both the United States and Egypt. The Washington Free Beacon published the video Monday in an exclusive report. El-Sayed was speaking at a GlobeMed conference while serving as Detroit’s health director. His comments followed a similar citizenship claim on his 2014 academic résumé. “I carry dual citizenship, and I grew up spending most of my summers in another country where I understood what it meant not to have the right to self-govern,” El-Sayed told the audience. He then described an encounter with Egyptian police during a summer trip, saying officers questioned him after he publicly cursed Hosni Mubarak, the country’s president at the time. El-Sayed continued to recount that incident during his Senate campaign. The citizenship statement adds another instance in which El-Sayed described himself as a dual citizen before his campaign denied that he ever held that status. The Free Beacon first raised the issue in January after finding a 2014 résumé that identified El-Sayed as a citizen of the United States and Egypt. He was working in public health academia at the time. Campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the outlet that the résumé entry reflected information El-Sayed had received from relatives as a child. “Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been,” Richner said. She said El-Sayed had been told that his grandfather sought Egyptian citizenship for him because both of his parents were born in Egypt. According to Richner, El-Sayed relied on that family account but could not substantiate it when he later looked into the matter. “This was an error based on what he was told by family members secondhand,” she said. “When he tried to verify this later on in life, he and his family were unable to find any documentation to verify this claim.” The campaign’s explanation addressed the résumé entry. The Free Beacon reported that the campaign did not answer its questions about the separate statement in the 2016 video. The two records show El-Sayed making the citizenship claim two years apart. Neither establishes his legal citizenship status, which his campaign disputes. El-Sayed was born in Michigan in 1984. His parents moved from Egypt to the Detroit area in 1978, according to the report.