Abdul El-Sayed, the left-wing Democrat running for Michigan's open Senate seat, told campaign staffers on a private strategy call that he wanted to stay silent on the killing of Iran's supreme leader because "there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today." Audio from the March 1 call, obtained and reported by the Washington Free Beacon, captures the candidate workshopping how to pivot away from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's death and toward attacks on President Trump, Israel, and AIPAC.
The recording paints a picture of a campaign more worried about offending a constituency that mourns a terrorist-sponsoring dictator than about leveling with voters on basic questions of national security. And it raises a blunt question: What kind of senator refuses to celebrate the removal of an enemy responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Americans?
Khamenei was killed in an Israeli airstrike on Feb. 28. He had served as president of Iran and then as the country's supreme leader starting in 1989, overseeing decades of state-sponsored terrorism. One day later, El-Sayed gathered his communications team on a conference call to discuss messaging around what the article calls "Operation Epic Fury."
El-Sayed's instinct was not to praise the strike or condemn the dead dictator. It was to duck.
"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."
Instead of addressing the killing head-on, El-Sayed told his team he planned to steer any media questions straight to Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. "I'm just gonna go straight to pedophilia, frankly," he said. He rehearsed the line: "Pedophile president decides that he doesn't like the front page news, so he decides to take us into another war."
That's the candidate's idea of moral high ground. His words, in fact: "We have the moral high ground here."
El-Sayed also coached his staff on how to handle reporters who might press him on whether the strike against Khamenei was justified. He predicted journalists would "try and bait us into saying, 'Yeah, but isn't it justified now that they took [Khamenei] out, right? And I just think, for us, we've got to be, like, 'no.'"
The audio reveals a candidate eager to use the moment to attack Israel and the pro-Israel lobby. El-Sayed told his team that the war benefits "Israel, who has captured too many of our politicians through AIPAC contributions." When an adviser cautioned that "Israel's issue always just makes me a little nervous," El-Sayed pushed forward. He said he wanted to "take the whole shot."
He spelled out what that meant: "I can't just allude to it. I got to take the whole shot, which means that I'm going to say, 'Look, you've got AIPAC-backed congress people who now don't want to empower Congress to step up and enforce its own prerogative.'" He added: "Ask yourself who that benefits and why? Ask yourself how powerful that force is in our politics if they won't even stand up to a president who's making illegal and unjustified war?"
The rhetoric goes further. El-Sayed described the broader conflict as the result of "having subsidized genocide" and accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of finding "an American president stupid enough to take us there." He framed the entire U.S.-Israel alliance as a corruption story driven by lobby money.
That kind of talk has become a source of open warfare inside the Democratic Party, with figures like Sen. John Fetterman publicly calling out what he sees as anti-Israel rot in his own ranks. El-Sayed's leaked audio suggests the rot runs deeper than the public debate.
El-Sayed is not operating in a vacuum. The Free Beacon reported that he appeared at an online progressive rally alongside popular streamer Hasan Piker, who once said the United States "deserved 9/11." The two are scheduled to appear together at rallies at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University on April 7.
El-Sayed has also aligned himself with Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud, who has called for the destruction of Israel, described Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack as "inevitable," and falsely accused the Jewish state of bombing Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza. Left-wing streamer Vaush, another El-Sayed ally, said he did not know how the "Democratic Party can survive" without making opposition to Israel a core tenet.
This is the coalition El-Sayed is building. Not a coalition of moderates trying to win a general election. A coalition of ideologues who treat the elimination of a terrorist regime's leader as a tragedy and Israel as the enemy.
El-Sayed is competing in a primary that also includes state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Rep. Haley Stevens. McMorrow criticized the U.S.-Israeli operation against Iran when it began, saying: "Instead of focusing resources to ensure Americans have access to healthcare, housing, jobs, safety and security in their own communities, this President has chosen a war overseas at the expense of everyone back home." She also said in October that Israel's war against Hamas met "the definition" of genocide, though she later lamented that the issue became a "political purity test."
Stevens struck a different tone, acknowledging that "Iran's state sponsorship of terror across the globe has led to chaos and unchecked violence" and calling for a congressional check on the president's military power. The contrast between the candidates' public positions matters. But El-Sayed's private comments reveal a gap between what Democrats say on camera and what they plan behind closed doors.
Michigan is ground zero for this fight. Dearborn became the nation's first Arab-majority city in 2023. Yet even Dearborn gave a plurality of its 2024 vote to President Donald Trump. That fact alone should tell Democratic strategists something about where the center of gravity sits. Voters in the state are not clamoring for candidates who mourn Khamenei and blame AIPAC for American foreign policy.
The wave of well-funded primary challengers tearing at Democratic incumbents nationally suggests the party's internal fractures are widening, not healing. El-Sayed's tape is one more crack in the foundation.
When the Free Beacon contacted the campaign for comment, El-Sayed's lawyers responded with a threat, not an answer. David Mitrani, a partner at the Sandler Reiff law firm in Washington, D.C., wrote: "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." He added that "the campaign is considering its legal options against the individual in question" and warned the outlet to "take this into account in determining whether to proceed with any reporting on this matter."
El-Sayed did not deny the quotes. He did not claim they were taken out of context. His campaign's first move was to question the legality of the recording and try to kill the story.
On X, El-Sayed posted a defiant response, calling his earlier public statement about the war a "risk" and adding: "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."
Courage is one word for it. Another word is calculation. The audio makes clear that El-Sayed's public positioning is the product of careful message-testing, not conviction arrived at in the open. He told his team to dodge Khamenei, pivot to Epstein, and "take the whole shot" against Israel when the moment was right.
The Free Beacon also reported on El-Sayed's past comments. After a Dearborn Heights resident who immigrated from Lebanon attacked a synagogue and preschool in West Bloomfield, Mich., El-Sayed issued a statement noting the attacker had "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 synagogue attacker's brother was a Hezbollah commander. El-Sayed himself later acknowledged the statement was a "risk."
The pattern is consistent. When forced to choose between condemning terrorism and explaining it away, El-Sayed reaches for the explanation. When asked to acknowledge that an American enemy is dead, he reaches for silence. When confronted with his own words, he reaches for lawyers.
Prominent Democrats like James Carville have argued that figures who hold these views should leave the party entirely. The question is whether Michigan Democratic primary voters agree, or whether the party's progressive flank has enough pull to send El-Sayed to the general election.
The ideological divisions inside the Democratic caucus are not limited to foreign policy. On domestic issues, Senate Democrats have broken sharply with the progressive wing on everything from energy policy to trade. But the Israel fault line cuts deepest, because it forces candidates to reveal whom they consider the villain and whom they consider the victim.
El-Sayed's leaked call answers that question with uncomfortable clarity. The villain, in his telling, is Israel, AIPAC, and any American politician who supports them. The victims are the people of Dearborn who are "sad" that a dictator who bankrolled terror for decades is dead.
Michigan voters deserve a senator who can tell the difference between an ally and an enemy. On tape, El-Sayed showed he can't, or won't.
