Unearthed Video Shows El-Sayed Claiming He’s a ‘Dual’ Citizen, Which His Campaign Says Isn’t True

A newly unearthed video shows Michigan Democratic Party nominee for the U.S. Senate Abdul El-Sayed claiming he is a dual citizen, which his campaign now denies.

“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 a Detroit GlobeMed conference in 2016. The Washington Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross first reported on the comments this week and added:

El-Sayed went on to tell a story, one he still tells on the campaign trail a decade later, that he was questioned by Egyptian police during one of those summer visits for publicly cursing Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president at the time.

The Beacon also noted, “The newly revealed 2016 video marks at least the second time El-Sayed has publicly claimed to have Egyptian status. His academic résumé stated in 2014 that he was a citizen of the United States and Egypt.

El-Sayed’s campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Beacon, “Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been.”

Richner added that El-Sayed was “told as a child that his grandfather had pursued Egyptian citizenship on his behalf, for which he was eligible due to his parents being born in Egypt. This was an error based on what he was told by family members secondhand. When he tried to verify this later on in life, he and his family were unable to find any documentation to verify this claim.”

El-Sayed has also come under fire on the campaign trail for claiming he is a physician.

Mehdi Hasan pressed El-Sayed on this point during a July interview, “You got attacked by your rivals for calling yourself a physician, not just a doctor, even though you don’t have a valid state medical license in New York or Michigan, which apparently is what you need legally to call yourself a physician. Do you wish you’d just stuck to calling yourself a doctor, which you are, to avoid all of this controversy and attacks on your physician status?”

El-Sayed replied, “You know, at the end of the day, it’s not about whether or not I’m a physician or a doctor. The question is, can you see a doctor? It’s not about my education, it’s about whether your kid gets good education. So I’m just not spending time on that.”

“Well, that’s a good line, but people would say it’s also about — did you tell the truth?” Hasan pressed back.

El-Sayed replied, “Well, I would say that I was the health director for the city of Detroit, and I’ve done more to provide more people health care and eliminate medical debt than most doctors have done in their practice career.”

Watch the clip above.

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