A Michigan Democratic Senate candidate told his campaign team he wanted to avoid saying anything publicly about the killing of Iran's supreme leader because too many Muslim voters in Dearborn were mourning. Audio from the private strategy call, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, captured Abdul El-Sayed mapping out a messaging plan that treated the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei not as a blow to a terrorist-sponsoring regime but as a political minefield to tiptoe around.
The call took place March 1, one day after an Israeli airstrike killed the Iranian dictator who had overseen deadly terrorist attacks that claimed the lives of hundreds of Americans. Khamenei had served as president of Iran and then as the country's supreme leader starting in 1989. His death was a seismic event in the Middle East. El-Sayed's instinct was silence.
That instinct tells you everything about where the Democratic Party's left flank now stands on American interests abroad. A man running for the United States Senate heard that a regime responsible for killing Americans had lost its leader and decided the smart political play was to say nothing, because his voter base might be grieving.
On the March 1 conference call with his communications team, El-Sayed laid out his thinking plainly. He told staffers he didn't want to comment on Khamenei "at all."
"I also want to remind you guys that there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today. So, like, I just don't want to comment on Khamenei at all. Like, I don't think it's worth even touching that."
Dearborn, Michigan, has the largest Muslim population per capita of any U.S. city. In 2023 it became the nation's first Arab-majority city. And in 2024, a plurality of its voters chose President Donald Trump. El-Sayed appeared to view those voters not as Americans who might welcome the end of a tyrant, but as a constituency whose grief over that tyrant's death had to be managed.
He didn't stop at silence. The audio showed El-Sayed coaching his team on how to pivot the conversation away from the strike itself and toward attacks on the president. His proposed frame was blunt.
"I'm just gonna go straight to pedophilia, frankly. I'll just be like, 'Pedophile president decides that he doesn't like the front page news, so he decides to take us into another war.'"
That line, calling the president a pedophile and framing the strike as a distraction, was the opening gambit. But El-Sayed had more to say about who he believed the real beneficiary of the operation was.
El-Sayed told his team he anticipated reporters would "try and bait us into saying, 'Yeah, but isn't it justified now that they took [Khamenei] out, right?'" His answer: "I just think, for us, we've got to be, like, 'no.'"
Then he went further, identifying who he believed actually benefited from the military action. "You know what benefits? It benefits Israel, who has captured too many of our politicians through AIPAC contributions," he said on the call. AIPAC is an American lobbying organization that supports pro-Israel candidates. El-Sayed's language, "captured", painted elected officials who support a longstanding U.S. ally as pawns of a foreign interest.
He told his team he needed to "take the whole shot," explaining his plan to tie his Democratic primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, directly to AIPAC. The wave of well-funded primary challengers tearing through the Democratic Party has made these kinds of intra-party attacks increasingly common, and increasingly bitter.
"If I'm gonna take the shot, I gotta set it. I gotta set up the whole shot. That's the thing.... Like, 'Look, I'm running against an AIPAC-backed Democratic congresswoman, and you know what her statement was, [she is] perfectly okay with this war.'"
El-Sayed also previewed his framing for a podcast appearance with left-wing influencer Jennifer Welch, predicting she was "going to bait me into the Israel stuff." He described the conflict in terms that went well beyond policy disagreement.
"If this is not a legitimate space for conversation about where our tax dollars go in the aftermath of having subsidized genocide and now getting pulled into an absolutely insane war in Iran because Netanyahu finally found an American president stupid enough to take us there, then I don't know what is."
That podcast episode dropped on March 4.
The leaked audio didn't surface in a vacuum. El-Sayed was a featured speaker at an online progressive rally that included popular streamer Hasan Piker, who has said the United States "deserved 9/11." Piker is scheduled to appear with El-Sayed at rallies at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University on April 7.
Left-wing streamer Vaush also appeared at the rally and said he did not know how the "Democratic Party can survive" without making opposition to Israel a core tenet. The roster tells you where El-Sayed sees his coalition, and it isn't with the moderate suburban voters Michigan Democrats have courted for years.
His primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, struck a markedly different tone on the strike. Stevens said, "Iran's state sponsorship of terror across the globe has led to chaos and unchecked violence." She also called for a congressional check on the president's military power. That's a recognizable American position, you can oppose executive overreach while acknowledging that a terror-sponsoring dictator's death is not something to mourn.
State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, another figure in the race, had in October said Israel's war against Hamas met "the definition" of genocide and criticized the U.S.-Israeli operation when it began. McMorrow said the president "has chosen a war overseas at the expense of everyone back home." The fractures inside Michigan's Democratic field run deep, and the fault line is Israel. James Carville's public demand that Ilhan Omar leave the Democratic Party reflected the same tension now ripping through this Senate primary.
El-Sayed's careful handling of Dearborn's political sensitivities also raises questions about the broader climate in the city. Dearborn's mayor, Abdullah Hammoud, has called for the destruction of Israel, said Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack was "inevitable," and falsely accused Israel of bombing Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza.
After a Dearborn Heights resident who immigrated from Lebanon attacked a synagogue and preschool in West Bloomfield, Michigan, El-Sayed released a lengthy video statement. He denounced the attack, but added that the attacker "lost family, including two children, in an airstrike in Lebanon last week. They were innocent people." The Israel Defense Forces announced soon after the attack that the attacker's brother was a Hezbollah commander.
On a subsequent organizing call, El-Sayed acknowledged his statement was a "risk." He then posted on X: "The 'risk' I took that these cowards will NEVER take is having the courage to call out an illegal and unjustified war that's killing children, wasting our tax dollars, and spiking gas prices, too." Framing sympathy for a synagogue attacker as "courage" is a choice. It's the kind of choice that tells voters exactly who a candidate is.
The Free Beacon had reported in December about El-Sayed's past posts and a 2021 op-ed. His 2020 memoir was also referenced. The pattern isn't new. What's new is the candor of the leaked call, a candidate speaking to his own team without the filter he applies to the public.
Sen. John Fetterman's blunt condemnation of the "rot" inside his own party on Israel looks more prescient by the week. The rot Fetterman described isn't abstract. It's a Senate candidate on a strategy call, coaching his staff to duck questions about a dead dictator because the voters he needs might be sad about it.
When the Free Beacon sought comment, El-Sayed's campaign didn't address the substance of the audio. David Mitrani, a partner at the Sandler Reiff law firm in Washington, D.C., responded with a legal threat instead.
"I write to inform you that the audio recording that you base the below questions on was obtained without the campaign's permission, and without knowledge that individuals were being recorded. The campaign is considering its legal options against the individual in question. Given these circumstances, the campaign expects that you will take this into account in determining whether to proceed with any reporting on this matter."
No denial. No correction. No explanation. Just a warning to the press that publishing the candidate's own words might carry consequences. The campaign's position, stripped to its core, is that the problem isn't what El-Sayed said. The problem is that you heard it.
Michigan voters deserve a Senate candidate who can say, clearly and without a strategy session, that the death of a dictator who killed Americans is not a tragedy. If you can't manage that because it might cost you votes in Dearborn, you've already told the country whose side you're on.
