LEAKED AUDIO: Michigan Progressive Warns His Voters Might Be ‘Sad’ Khamenei Killed by US

Screenshot via YouTube

Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive candidate in Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary, told his staff during a conference call he worried about celebrating the killing of Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei because his voters in Dearborn would be “sad” about it.

“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,” El-Sayed said on the call, the audio of which was released on Monday by the Washington Free Beacon.

Senior investigative reporter for the Free Beacon, Alana Goodman, scooped the news, which was quickly picked up by Republican campaign committees. The Republican National Senatorial Committee shared a clip of El-Sayed’s remarks on social media with an alert icon and the heading: “LEAKED AUDIO FROM ABDUL EL-SAYED ON THE DEATH OF IRAN’S SUPREME LEADER.”

Goodman’s report also included El-Sayed strategizing on how he would dodge questions on the killing of Khamenei, whose regime had massacred thousands of protesters in the weeks prior.

“I’m just gonna go straight to pedophilia, frankly,” El-Sayed told his staff, “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.'”

During the call, El-Sayed added, “We have the moral high ground here,” and warned that reporters will “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.'”

El-Sayed has stirred controversy in recent days for a planned rally with controversial Twitch influencer Hasan Piker, who has long boosted terrorist groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis.

“[Piker] is a provocateur, to put it lightly, who says things that are misogynistic and antisemitic, and said that the United States deserved 9/11,” said Mallory McMorrow last week of the rally. McMorrow, the popular Michigan state senator running against El-Sayed in the primary, added:

That is not somebody that you should be campaigning with at a moment when there is clearly a lot of pain and trauma across our state. How do you bring everybody together, especially when there are difficult conversations, where there aren’t easy answers? You don’t fan the flames and stoke division just to get attention.

El-Sayed also grabbed headlines earlier in the week when Punchbowl News reported that he warned it was a “risk” to condemn the recent synagogue and preschool attack in Michigan. El-Sayed released a statement condemning the synagogue attack earlier in the month, connecting the attack to the perpetrator’s loss of family in an Israeli airstrike.

“A week earlier, an airstrike killed his niece and nephew. Imagine if that had never happened. Imagine there was no war in Iran. Imagine if there were no airstrikes in Lebanon. Imagine if his family had never died,” El-Sayed said in his statement, adding, “We can and must condemn the attack on Temple Israel, and we can and must condemn the violence 6,000 miles away.”

Punchbowl reported last Tuesday that while “reflecting on the statement during an organizing call on March 18, El-Sayed admitted his take was controversial.”

“It was a risk,” El-Sayed said of the statement. “All of our team was really worried about saying something, but leadership is being willing to say the thing if you believe it to be true that nobody else is going to say.”

Listen to the full audio above.

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!