Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed Deletes Old 9/11 Posts as 25th Anniversary Nears

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Breaking

CBS News reported this week that Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat, deleted a series of old social media posts referencing the September 11 attacks. In a September 11, 2021 post, El-Sayed wrote that after mourning the roughly 3,000 Americans killed that day, he would also mourn “a million lives, millions more injured, and the infrastructural devastation of three countries,” a reference to the wars launched in response to the attacks. A separate April 2020 post compared the coronavirus death toll to the roughly 3,000 lives lost on 9/11, arguing Americans should mobilize against COVID the way the country did after the attacks.

Confronted by a CBS reporter about the posts, El-Sayed said “what happened on 9/11 is a disaster, it was a terrible attack on our country,” while defending his broader point about servicemembers sent into wars he’s argued were unnecessary. His campaign said he had deleted all social media posts older than July 2023 to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context, with a spokesperson adding that “Abdul has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks,” and dismissing the scrutiny as bad-faith attacks.

Details & Background

El-Sayed, a former Michigan public health official, is the Democratic nominee in one of the most competitive Senate races in the country, facing Republican Mike Rogers, a former congressman making his second consecutive run for the seat after narrowly losing in 2024. The deleted posts surfaced just as the country approaches the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a milestone that has intensified scrutiny of how candidates in both parties have discussed the day and its aftermath over the years.

The controversy has been compounded by El-Sayed’s association with Twitch commentator Hasan Piker, who campaigned alongside him during the Democratic primary and has made his own widely criticized remarks about 9/11 in the past. Despite calls from fellow Democrats, including Sen. John Fetterman and Rep. Brad Schneider, to publicly disavow Piker, El-Sayed has declined, saying when pressed that he is “not interested in a conversation about a social media person in California.”

Reactions

The CBS report itself became a flashpoint, drawing accusations from progressive commentators, Piker among them, that the outlet was unfairly targeting El-Sayed, with some critics tying the coverage to recent leadership changes at the network. Piker called the story’s framing “insane” and suggested it reflected a rightward shift at CBS’s parent company.

Republicans, by contrast, seized on the deleted posts as evidence of a pattern, folding them into a broader case that El-Sayed has struggled to draw a clear line between himself and more incendiary voices on the left, including Piker’s own past comments about the attacks. The episode has given Rogers’ campaign a fresh opening to question El-Sayed’s judgment less than two months before Election Day.

Michigan’s Senate race is shaping up as one of the most closely watched in the country, and character-based controversies like this one can move the needle in a contest expected to be decided by a narrow margin. A candidate’s handling of a moment as sensitive as the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and his willingness or refusal to separate himself from controversial allies, offers voters a window into how he’d navigate similarly fraught moments in the Senate.

For an electorate still processing the legacy of 9/11 a quarter century later, the episode is a reminder that old social media posts don’t disappear so much as wait to resurface at the worst possible moment for a campaign, and that how a candidate responds under pressure can matter as much as what was said in the first place. Michigan voters won’t render their verdict until next November, but early missteps like this one tend to shape the narrative campaigns carry into the final stretch, and both sides know it.

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