Abdul El-Sayed Let Something Slip and It’s a Point His Campaign Has Tried to Deny

Abdul El-Sayed might have just let something slip, and it’s not good. It’s a small fact he tried to deny many times before, and until recently it sort of slipped under the radar. But new audio seems to confirm that his dual citizenship with Egypt, which caused a stir, is, indeed, true. His campaign has denied this was the case, so what do they say now that we have the candidate admitting as much (via Free Beacon):

🚨 WATCH: Abdul El-Sayed says that he has dual citizenship in Egypt. His campaign previously claimed that he has never been a dual citizen. https://t.co/sz3rs61Do5

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) October 5, 2026

Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed told a Detroit audience in 2016 that he has “dual citizenship” in the United States and Egypt, according to previously unreported video. It’s the second time he’s been documented making the claim, even though his campaign now claims he was never a dual citizen.

El-Sayed made the remark about his dual citizenship onstage at a GlobeMed conference in Detroit, where the far-left Democrat served as the city’s health director at the time.

“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,” said El-Sayed, whose parents emigrated from Egypt to the Detroit area in 1978.

El-Sayed’s campaign has tried to claim it was likely a clerical error when he became a professor at Columbia University in 2014, a position he held for only about a year before returning to Michigan and joining the Detroit Health Department. Washington Free Beacon reached out about this ‘error’ back in January:

As an assistant professor at Columbia University, Abdul El-Sayed said he held dual U.S.-Egyptian citizenship. El-Sayed is now running for a Michigan Senate seat, and his campaign says that was a mistake—he’s not an Egyptian citizen and never has been.

El-Sayed was born in Michigan to Egyptian émigrés. He graduated from Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 2014 and joined Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health the same year. Around that time, El-Sayed published his résumé on an academic networking site. It lists his “citizenships” as “USA, Egypt.” El-Sayed’s résumé was removed from the site he published it to, Academia, after the Washington Free Beacon sent it to the campaign.

That was then, this is now. “Abdul is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been,” campaign spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Free Beacon. She said that the physician 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,” but that his unnamed informant was wrong.

“When he tried to verify this later on in life,” Richner said, “he and his family were unable to find any documentation to verify this claim.” Richner did not respond to a request for comment on when and how El-Sayed determined that he is not, in fact, an Egyptian citizen.

[…]

The campaign’s explanation suggests that, at best, El-Sayed claimed Egyptian citizenship on his CV at the age of 30 without verifying the accuracy of the claim. There is reason to believe, however, that El-Sayed would have known he was not a dual national by the time he was teaching at Columbia.

In his 2020 memoir, Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey Into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic, El-Sayed writes at length of spending his “summers in Egypt” as a teenager, traveling there alone to visit his grandparents and extended family. U.S. passport holders can obtain a single-entry tourist visa upon arrival in Egypt for roughly $25. Dual citizens are not subject to the fee. As a frequent traveler to Egypt, El-Sayed would have gone through the entry process repeatedly.

During one visit as a young teen, El-Sayed said he protested the then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, according to his book. He claimed police showed up to threaten him at his family’s apartment that night, but they backed off after he showed them his “American passport.”

Nice work, guys. So, what else is he hiding? 

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