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…
Page A5From§Eachthe supper edition — 31 August 2026
El-Sayed deletes 9/11-era tweets, faces scrutiny, then hires Jewish community liaison as olive branch.
As it ran on the front
Here's how the play works, every time, and it worked again this week. A candidate for Senate has old tweets about 9/11. The tweets get deleted. Deleted tweets don't disappear, they just wait for a reporter with a scraper, and CBS found them, and the scrutiny started right on schedule. Days later, the same campaign announces a new hire: a Jewish community liaison, described in the campaign's own language as an olive branch.
Notice the order. Not: candidate builds a relationship with a community over years, then hires staff to formalize it. It's: tweets surface, scrutiny lands, staffer gets hired, framed as outreach. That's not a relationship, that's a press release with a title attached. The olive branch only grew after the branch was needed for cover, and the timeline is public record, dated both ways, no reading required beyond the two headlines sitting next to each other.…
…(cont) This is the same move every campaign makes when the deleted-tweets guy needs a human shield fast: hire the liaison, announce the liaison, let the liaison's job title do the apologizing so the candidate doesn't have to. It costs a salary line, it buys a news cycle, and it works, because the story becomes 'candidate hires liaison' instead of 'candidate deleted tweets nobody's supposed to see.'
The stakes here aren't abstract. This is a Senate seat, one of a hundred, and the person who wins it votes on real things — appropriations, judges, war powers — for six years regardless of which press release ran that week. Voters get the liaison's title. They don't get the tweets back, and they don't get an explanation, they get a hire.
Nobody's saying the liaison shouldn't exist. Outreach staff are a normal part of a campaign. What's worth noticing is the order things happened in, because the order is the tell. When the apology arrives exactly as fast as the scrutiny does, and not one day before, that's not a relationship being built. That's a fire being put out, in real time, in public, on a payroll.
“Tweets get deleted, a reporter finds them anyway, and a week later there's a brand-new liaison whose whole job is smoothing it over. That's not outreach, that's damage control with a business card.”
“Voters have a right to know what a candidate said about September 11th, and deleting the record only makes the accountability more urgent — I mean, we're not saying the liaison hire is bad, we're saying — actually the liaison hire is exactly the kind of outreach we'd praise if anyone else did it, so, we support it, and the tweets are the real story, both things, at once.”
The receipts
Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed deleted posts invoking 9/11 and the U.S. response.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.