Abdul El-Sayed, the Soros-backed Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan who has never held elected office, has been buried under a barrage of damaging revelations that expose the ugly reality of his alleged ties to Islamist extremist groups, the Muslim Brotherhood, and family connections raising glaring national-security red flags. Those scandals have turned even uglier in the final weeks of the 2026 midterms.
Despite the mounting questions, progressive heavyweights have rushed in with cash and cover.
On October 16, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez transferred $1 million from her campaign fund to a joint account supporting El-Sayed while campaigning with him in Michigan, framing the money as a counter to “smears.” The next day, El-Sayed confirmed to Fox’s Mike Tobin that his sister-in-law Mariam Jukaku had been placed on the terrorist watchlist under the Obama administration and said she “sued and got off,” while at a Caro town hall he disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood and challenged the questioner’s motives as dual-loyalty assumptions tied to his faith.
Daily Wire coverage of the Canary Mission findings has mapped the broader coordinated funding network behind him.
The money trail is clear: CAIR Action poured roughly $185,000 into the Unity & Justice Fund super PAC, which then funneled support to Fighting for Michigan PAC, the biggest outside group boosting Abdul El-Sayed. His own father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, a longtime CAIR-Michigan leader, also wrote checks to the fund and the campaign, while a parallel web of progressive PACs kept the operation running behind the “small-donor” branding.
El-Sayed is set to share a stage with Barack Hussein Obama this week while facing Republican opponent Mike Rogers, even as the Obama administration placed his sister-in-law on the terrorist watch list in 2012. El-Sayed has denied any personal involvement with extremist groups and has dismissed the questions as smears driven by his Muslim faith.
The recently exposed pattern of Islamist extremism is impossible to ignore, the links began decades ago.
In the early 1970s, El-Sayed’s mother, Fatten Elkomy, was active in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt during her college years, according to 2012–2013 social-media posts by his half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi.
Abdelhadi wrote that “my family has long been MB,” that relatives had been jailed for involvement, and that she had spoken with their mother about the activism. El-Sayed has claimed he was not raised by his mother and never discussed it with her, calling the posts “hearsay.”
Source: X, @emanabdelhadi, July 3, 2013
By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Elkomy was employed by the Islamic American Relief Agency. In 2004 the US Treasury designated the group a supporter of terrorism for financial links to al-Qaeda, including support associated with Osama bin Laden, Hamas, and the Taliban. Court records from a later federal case referenced her role in certain transfers and communications, though she was never charged. This history has raised inescapable questions about the family’s connections to a group that hates America and was later designated for financing al-Qaeda, Hamas, and the Taliban. El-Sayed has responded by asking whether critics were “going after my mom.”
In 2007, as vice president of the Muslim Students Association at the University of Michigan, El-Sayed helped lead a walkout protest against a campus event featuring three speakers billed as former Palestine Liberation Organization terrorists who had converted to Christianity.
In 2011 and 2012, El-Sayed publicly backed the Egyptian revolution that installed Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, as president. He signed an open letter supporting Morsi’s government moves that aligned with the Brotherhood’s efforts to consolidate Islamist control, suppress critics, and advance an agenda that included hostility toward minorities and secular institutions.
The Muslim Brotherhood is a transnational Islamist movement founded in Egypt in 1928 that seeks to replace secular governance with a state governed by strict sharia law. The ideology itself rejects the separation of religion and state as well as Western political models. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Russia, and Syria designate it a terrorist group for destabilization and extremism, and the United States has sanctioned certain linked entities and individuals for supporting terrorism.
Many of its followers are linked to violence and terrorism. Hamas began as its Palestinian wing.
In 2012, sister-in-law Mariam Jukaku’s boarding pass was stamped “SSSS” at Detroit Metro, triggering extensive searches and testing after she was flagged as a known or suspected terrorist. She joined CAIR-backed lawsuits in 2016 challenging her alleged placement on the Terrorism Screening Database. El-Sayed later claimed she “sued and got off,” but an appeals court overturned a favorable ruling in 2021 and a damages suit was dismissed in 2017. The FBI neither confirms nor denies watchlist status. El-Sayed confirmed the connection to Fox News.
El-Sayed’s father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, has long held leadership roles including past president of CAIR-Michigan and a long-standing position connected to the Islamic Society of North America. Both groups were named unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation case, in which defendants were convicted of funneling millions to Hamas. CAIR has been designated a terrorist organization by Texas and Florida.
In the current campaign, the issues have resurfaced. On October 5, 2026, El-Sayed told Fox News he would support terror designations for organizations engaged in political violence but pressed for evidence when asked specifically about Muslim Brotherhood branches.
The pressure only mounted in the campaign’s final days. On October 19, James O’Keefe released undercover footage of a man identified as Abdoul Beckwith, described as a regional field organizer for the El-Sayed campaign. In the recording, Beckwith claimed El-Sayed receives illegal overseas donations routed through family members and said the candidate “can’t just say… I reject all of them” regarding Hamas because “he’s going to lose the people that brought him up in the first place.”
El-Sayed’s campaign has denied that Beckwith ever worked for them, called the claims false, and stated that the campaign complies with federal election law. The Michigan Democratic Party also said Beckwith was terminated and that the statements are untrue. Many view the video as an “October surprise,” arguing it adds a fresh allegation of improper foreign funding and reluctance to disavow Hamas to the existing questions about family associations, organizational ties, and the CAIR-linked money network already under scrutiny.
They’re deploying every major surrogate and tactic available: Obama sharing a stage, AOC pouring in money and campaigning beside him, and Kamala Harris lending residual name recognition. A newly circulating video of El-Sayed ordering fried chicken during a Black-voter outreach effort has drawn criticism as clumsy racial pandering. The pattern is clear, no demographic left untargeted, even as the same national-security questions about family associations, organizational ties, and the CAIR-linked funding network remain unresolved.
