Vance Says El-Sayed 'Lied' About Being an Immigrant From Another Continent; His Campaign Calls the Dual-Citizenship Claim an Error
At a Michigan rally for Mike Rogers, the vice president pointed to El-Sayed's past remarks about his origins. El-Sayed was born in Michigan. His campaign says he was misinformed by a relative and was never an Egyptian citizen.
Vice President JD Vance used a Michigan rally to accuse Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed of lying about where he is from, Breitbart reports.
What Vance said. Campaigning for Republican nominee Mike Rogers, Vance told the crowd, "We have to understand what happens when our nation gives in to these kinds of people, to young men with zero attachment to its land or to its history, with a man who would lie, who is so ashamed of this state that he would lie about being an immigrant from another continent." Breitbart cites video posted by the Trump War Room.
The record Breitbart points to. El-Sayed was born in Michigan in 1984 to Egyptian immigrants. At the Michigan Democratic Party's 2017 convention, he told the Progressive Caucus he "may be an immigrant from North Africa," according to video obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. He listed U.S. and Egyptian citizenship on a 2014 Columbia University resume and said onstage at a 2016 Detroit conference that he held "dual citizenship."
The campaign's response. Spokeswoman Roxie Richner told the Free Beacon that the candidate was misinformed by a relative and called the claim "an error based on what he was told by family members secondhand." She said El-Sayed "is not a dual citizen by any verifiable metric and never has been." Responding to Vance at an earlier stop, El-Sayed called himself "a Wolverine, not a weasel" who was born and raised in Michigan. His campaign says Republicans lift his past comments out of context.
The race. Rogers faces El-Sayed in a toss-up contest that could help decide control of the Senate. At an earlier rally in Monroe, Vance called El-Sayed "one of the craziest, one of the most far-left, and one of the most radical people running for high office in the history of the United States of America."
Note for readers: El-Sayed's U.S. birth is not in dispute. The disagreement is over his earlier statements about his background and whether he ever held Egyptian citizenship, which his campaign denies. We have not seen the video clips ourselves.