Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said in a 2016 speech in Detroit that he held dual citizenship, contradicting his campaign’s current assertion that he has never been a citizen of both the United States and Egypt.
The Washington Free Beacon released the footage in an exclusive Monday. El-Sayed spoke at a GlobeMed conference while serving as Detroit’s health director. His remarks follow a 2014 academic resume in which he made similar civic demands.
“I have dual citizenship and spent most of my summer vacations in another country where I understood what it meant to have no autonomy,” El-Saeed told the audience.
He then described an encounter with Egyptian police during a summer trip, saying they questioned him after he publicly cursed the country’s then-president, Hosni Mubarak. Syed continued to recount the incident during his Senate campaign.
The citizenship statement also adds another example of Said describing himself as a dual citizen before his campaign denied he ever held such status.
The Free Beacon first raised the issue in January after discovering a 2014 resume showing El-Sayed to be a U.S. and Egyptian citizen. At the time he was working in academia in public health.
Campaign spokesperson Roxie Richner told the outlet the resume entries reflected information El-Sayed received from relatives as a child.
“Abdel is not a dual citizen by any verifiable standard and never has been,” Richner said.
She said Said was told that his grandfather applied for Egyptian citizenship for him because both his parents were born in Egypt. According to Richner, El-Said relied on the family’s account, but was unable to confirm it when he later investigated the matter.
“Based on what his family told him indirectly, this was a mistake,” she said. “When he later tried to corroborate this, he and his family were unable to find any documentation to substantiate this claim.”
The explanation of this activity involves resume entries. The campaign did not respond to questions about the separate statement in the 2016 film, the Free Beacon reported.
The two records show that El-Sayed applied for citizenship two years apart. Neither established his legal citizenship, which his campaign disputed.
According to reports, El-Sayed was born in Michigan in 1984. His parents moved to the Detroit area from Egypt in 1978.