Six days before the November 3 midterm elections, the Muslim Brotherhood has become an issue in Michigan’s U.S. Senate race. Republican nominee Mike Rogers, a former FBI special agent and congressman, has accused Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed of ties to the Brotherhood.
Trump has said of El-Sayed, “He’s a Muslim Brotherhood guy, 100%.” El-Sayed denies that he or his family has ties to the group. At an October 17 town hall in Caro, Michigan, a voter asked whether he would disavow the Brotherhood. He answered, “Sure, yeah, absolutely.” However, to date, there is no record of him following through with a formal denunciation.
The accusations concern El-Sayed’s past statements and his family’s alleged connections to the Brotherhood. In January 2011, as protesters in Cairo demanded President Hosni Mubarak’s removal, El-Sayed wrote a Huffington Post article urging the United States to support the uprising. Mubarak’s government had banned the Brotherhood as a political party. Responding to warnings that his fall could bring the group to power, El-Sayed argued that a Brotherhood-led government would resemble neither Iran nor Hamas’s rule in Gaza.
Mubarak resigned the following month. In June 2012, Mohamed Morsi, a longtime Brotherhood leader, won Egypt’s presidential election with just over 51 percent of the vote. That November, Morsi issued a decree expanding his powers and shielding his decisions from judicial review.
On November 25, the Egyptian news portal Al-Ahram Gate published a statement signed by 46 Egyptian-American community leaders supporting what they called the president’s “revolutionary decisions.” The statement called on Morsi to purge the media and police “as quickly as possible.” The 33rd signature is that of “Dr. Abdul Rahman El-Sayed” of New York. The New York Times reported that El-Sayed signed the statement while studying medicine at Columbia University.
In the following months, Egyptian authorities prosecuted journalists for insulting Islam, according to the Free Beacon. The military removed Morsi in July 2013, and Egypt designated the Brotherhood a terrorist organization that December. El-Sayed’s campaign has declined to answer questions about his signing of the November 2012 statement.
Questions about his family’s connections concern posts by his half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, a professor at the University of Chicago. She wrote in 2012 that “my family has long been MB.” In another post that year, she described their mother’s activism in the Brotherhood in the early 1970s.
The race follows a year of government action against the Brotherhood. On November 18, 2025, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott designated the Brotherhood and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as foreign terrorist organizations under state law. On November 24, Trump signed an executive order directing the State and Treasury departments to consider designating the Brotherhood’s chapters in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a similar executive order targeting the Brotherhood and CAIR on December 8. On January 13, 2026, the State and Treasury departments designated the three Brotherhood branches as terrorist entities. CAIR denies ties to Hamas, terrorism or the Brotherhood.
On August 5, Sen. Ted Cruz chaired a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing titled “Hidden in Plain Sight: Confronting the Muslim Brotherhood Network in America.” The subcommittee’s Democratic members boycotted it. Witnesses drew on the Brotherhood’s founding texts and internal documents seized by the FBI to describe its objectives.
Hassan al-Banna founded the Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928. A peer-reviewed 2023 study in the journal Religions describes his plan as a gradual, seven-stage program: Islamizing the individual, family, society, government and state; restoring the caliphate; and achieving ustādhiyyat al-ʿālam, or “mastership of the world.”
At a July 2018 hearing of the House Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, Hudson Institute senior fellow Hillel Fradkin testified that the Brotherhood had never repudiated its core principles. An FBI briefing document, later released through a Freedom of Information Act request, similarly assessed that its goals and objectives had not changed significantly since its founding.
The Brotherhood’s motto states the role of jihad in that program: “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our constitution. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”
According to the congressional record, Brotherhood members assassinated Egyptian Prime Minister Mahmud Fahmi al-Naqrashi in 1948. Hamas’s 1988 charter identifies the group as a wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine. The United States has designated Hamas a foreign terrorist organization since 1997.
Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Brotherhood’s leading cleric, issued a fatwa legitimizing attacks on American troops in Iraq. In 2010, Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie called for resistance against what he termed Zio-American arrogance and tyranny. In January 2018, the State Department designated two offshoots of the Egyptian Brotherhood, HASM and Liwa al-Thawra, over bombings and assassinations of Egyptian officials.
Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies testified that Qatar had sent $8 billion in financial aid to Mohamed Morsi’s Brotherhood government in Egypt by July 2013. He said Qatar’s former emir pledged $400 million to Hamas in 2012 and that Turkey became a hub for exiled Egyptian and international Brotherhood figures after Morsi’s ouster. Schanzer described Turkey’s ruling AKP as effectively the Brotherhood’s Turkish arm.
The Brotherhood also set out a strategy for the West. An internal 1982 paper known as “The Project,” published in French by journalist Sylvain Besson in 2005, laid out a decades-long program to penetrate existing institutions, build coalitions and develop parallel social structures. It directed members to use democratic freedoms of speech and association to advance those aims.
A 1991 document by Mohamed Akram, a member of the Brotherhood’s Shura Council, sets out a strategy for North America. Titled “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” it defines the Brotherhood’s work there as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.”
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The FBI seized the memorandum in 2004, and prosecutors introduced it as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial. In 2008, a jury convicted the foundation and five of its leaders on charges involving material support to Hamas, money laundering and tax fraud.
Lara Burns, the retired FBI special agent who led the investigation, described the activities of the Brotherhood’s Palestine Committee in her Senate testimony. She said committee leaders met in Philadelphia in October 1993 to plan continued support for Hamas while maintaining an appearance of legitimacy. The FBI wiretapped the meeting, where attendees declared that “war is deception” and planned to mislead the American public about their motives.
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