Abdul El-Sayed has a sister.
She has been talking about their family for years.
He says he’s never listened.
That was the gist of a tense exchange this week between the Michigan Democrat, now running for the U.S. Senate, and NBC’s Tom Llamas. Llamas asked about posts from El-Sayed’s sister, Eman Abdelhadi, first surfaced by the Washington Free Beacon.
In them she says the family has “long been” in the Muslim Brotherhood. She says relatives in Egypt went to jail over it. She says their mother, Fatten Elkomy, was active in the group as a college student in Egypt in the 1970s.
This mattered because of what El-Sayed had said just days earlier. On Meet the Press he told the country that neither he nor his family had any ties to the Brotherhood.
So Llamas asked him to square it.
El-Sayed didn’t care for the question. “You want to ask me about what was happening in Egypt in 1970? Are you serious?”
Llamas was serious. Did his mother have ties?
“I have never had these conversations with my mother,” El-Sayed said. Then he reached for a lawyer’s word. The source, he said, was “hearsay evidence from a tweet.”
It’s a clever line. It doesn’t quite work.
A tweet is anonymous.
A sister is not.
Abdelhadi isn’t a stranger on the internet or an opposition researcher. She’s family, speaking about her own family, long before her brother’s campaign made it inconvenient.
And they are close. That isn’t speculation. El-Sayed’s parents split when he was a toddler, and he was raised by his father and stepmother.
But he stayed near his mother and sister. He called his mother in a Mother’s Day campaign video. In 2020 he Venmoed his sister money toward a birthday gift for their mom.
In 2016, he stood as Abdelhadi’s guardian at her wedding, a ceremony performed under Sharia law, with their mother there, according to the Free Beacon.
These are not people who don’t talk. They just, apparently, never talked about this.
When Llamas noted that El-Sayed has made a point of going after the president on honesty, the candidate bristled again. Was Llamas suggesting he’d lied?
“I don’t know,” Llamas said. “That’s why I’m asking.”
That is the job. It’s also the voter’s job.
Because this isn’t the first time El-Sayed has said a relative gave him bad information. In 2016 he said he held dual U.S.-Egyptian citizenship. His campaign now calls that an “error,” blaming an unnamed family member.
At some point a pattern becomes the story.
And the family is only part of it.
The Brotherhood, which gave rise to Hamas in the 1980s, turns up elsewhere in El-Sayed’s record. In 2012, he signed an open letter urging Egypt’s newly elected Brotherhood government to “purge” the country’s press and police, the Free Beacon reported.
In a 2021 Substack post, since deleted, he defended a friend jailed for funding the Egyptian Brotherhood. His father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, has long sat on the board of the Islamic Society of North America, which federal prosecutors once identified as a Brotherhood front.
None of this means a man must answer for every relative’s past. Nobody picks his family.
But he does pick his answers.
And “I never asked” is a thin one from someone asking Michigan for a Senate seat.
Abdelhadi, who was arrested last year after allegedly assaulting a police officer at an anti-ICE protest in Chicago, did not respond to questions about her brother’s remarks.
She has said plenty already. Her brother says he wasn’t listening.
Voters might want to.
HOLD THE PRESS: NBC holds Abdul El-Sayed’s feet to the fire on his family’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
He CLEARLY panicked and lashed out at the reporter.
NBC: “When people ask you a question, they do expect the truth.”
EL-SAYED (flustered): “Are you insinuating that… pic.twitter.com/vLWRzr28Sc
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) October 14, 2026
