Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed deleted posts invoking 9/11 and the U.S. response.
Page A7From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
El-Sayed offers Jewish community liaison as olive branch; press responds by resurfacing his old 9/11 tweets.
As it ran on the front
Abdul El-Sayed hires a Jewish community liaison, a specific staffing decision, a specific gesture, the kind of move a campaign makes when it wants a specific relationship on record before the ads start running. Same week, the same outlets that will run those ads go digging through his old tweets, the deleted ones, from around September 11th, and turn that into the story instead. Notice the order: the outreach comes first, the record search comes second, and the second one is the one that gets the headline.
This isn't really about the tweets. It's never really about the tweets. It's about timing a story to land the moment a candidate tries to close a gap with a constituency the same candidate is accused, in the very next paragraph, of alienating. You hire the liaison, you get covered as though the liaison never happened. That's not journalism catching up to a candidate; that's a candidate's outreach getting buried under the same day's opposition research, filed by people who had that research on hand the whole time and picked the week it would do the most damage.…
…(cont) The DSA connection matters here too, because a working-class candidate with contradictions in the public record is a normal candidate, is every candidate, is what twenty years of a public life looks like when someone goes looking. The question is who's looking, when, and why that week. A Senate campaign makes one conciliatory move and gets answered with an archive dive. That's not coincidence, that's a pattern with a name, and the name is opposition research timed to a news cycle.
The guy at the end of the bar doesn't care about the tweets from 2011. He cares that the story that ran was the dig, not the outreach, and that the outlets running the dig knew exactly which week to run it. That's the con: make the gesture disappear under the gotcha, every time, on schedule.
“Abdul El-Sayed hires a Jewish community liaison, a specific move, timed like a campaign move is supposed to be. Same week, the same outlets that'll run the attack ads go digging through his deleted tweets from around September 11th instead, and that's the one that gets the headline. The outreach doesn't disappear by accident — it disappears under the dig, on schedule, every time.”
“Resurfacing years-old tweets about September 11th is just basic vetting, that's what we do for every candidate, it isn't targeted at — well, we did wait until the liaison announcement to run it, but that's a scheduling matter, not a targeting matter. Legitimate news organizations report on relevant public statements whenever they happen to find them, which is, this week, coincidentally, the same week as the outreach story.”
The receipts
The campaign of Senate nominee Abdul el Sayed will hire a liaison to Michigan’s Jewish community, marking his latest attempt to ease tensions with a historically Democratic voting bloc. El Sayed’s team is vetting candidates for the…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.