Michigan’s Democrat Senate nominee just crossed a finish line the establishment tried hard to prevent him from reaching.
Now a different set of alarm bells is ringing — and they have nothing to do with campaign fundraising totals.
Conservatives are raising serious questions about what happens to American national security if Abdul El-Sayed picks up a Senate badge in November.
The Privilege Nobody Talks About When They Talk About Senators
Most people assume government officials who handle classified material go through some kind of formal vetting process. For a lot of them, that’s true.
But senators operate under a different set of rules entirely.
Unlike congressional staffers and many executive-branch officials, senators are not required to obtain a formal executive-branch security clearance to be eligible for classified information related to their official duties. Members of Congress gain access to sensitive intelligence simply by virtue of holding elected office. No background check required. No formal clearance process. Just a seat at the table — and everything that comes with it.
That structural quirk normally draws little attention. But with El-Sayed as Michigan’s Democrat nominee heading into November, national security and policy experts are paying very close attention to it now.
Daniel Samet, a research fellow specializing in Middle East policy at the center-right American Enterprise Institute, did not hedge when asked about the situation.
“Anyone refusing to disavow America-hater Hasan Piker should never be elected to Congress. El-Sayed will use his perch in the Senate to undermine America and empower its enemies,” Samet told Fox News Digital.
Samet argued that El-Sayed has associated with people who support the intifada and terrorist causes and that he has shown sympathy for radical Islamist ideology. That is a serious charge — and the documented record of El-Sayed’s appearances and affiliations gives it more grounding than critics of the candidate would prefer to acknowledge.
A Pattern of Troubling Associations That El-Sayed Has Not Fully Disavowed
Fox News Digital and other outlets have reported on El-Sayed’s appearances and political relationships with individuals who have expressed support for or made favorable statements about US-designated terrorist organizations.
In April, El-Sayed was introduced at a campaign rally by Amir Makled, a man who previously celebrated dead members of the terrorist organization Hezbollah as “martyr[s].”
A few months later, at a mosque opening, El-Sayed shared a stage with Sheikh Fadhel al-Sahlani, a cleric who has previously praised Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and made remarks minimizing the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. These are not obscure figures with distant, deniable connections to El-Sayed. He appeared alongside them, on stages, in public, during his Senate campaign.
El-Sayed also accepted an endorsement from Osama Siblani, who has praised both Hamas and Hezbollah.
And then there is Hasan Piker, the Twitch streamer who once said that America “deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed appeared with Piker on the campaign trail and only after being pressed did he call that statement “dumb.” He distanced himself somewhat, but stopped short of totally disavowing him.
Islamic terrorists directed by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks — the worst act of mass murder on American soil in history. A man running for the United States Senate who cannot fully disavow someone who said America deserved that attack has a serious problem. And that problem gets considerably more serious when the job he is seeking comes with automatic access to classified intelligence.
El-Sayed’s half-sister drew additional scrutiny after she posted what was described as an “October 7th blessing” on the first anniversary of the Hamas attack that killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel, including civilians, and led to the taking of hostages. El-Sayed previously told Fox News Digital that he loves his sister and that the two have disagreements when it comes to foreign policy. His campaign stressed that no one speaks for El-Sayed except El-Sayed himself.
But the response struck many critics as conspicuously restrained for something as grave as a family member publicly celebrating a massacre.
Heritage Action government relations director Chip Wyatt, who previously served as a mid-level staffer to US Senator Mike Lee, put it plainly: “His affiliation with communists like Hasan Piker who claimed America deserved 9/11 combined with repeated calls to abolish ICE compound these concerns. Senators handle sensitive intelligence with major national security implications; Giving someone like El-Sayed access would put American lives at risk.”
El-Sayed’s Campaign Fires Back — at His Republican Opponent
The El-Sayed campaign declined to engage directly with the national security critique and instead went after Republican nominee Mike Rogers.
“Abdul’s running to keep Americans safe and bring down costs for Michigan families. Mike Rogers spent his entire career selling out Michigan, and has directly profited off shady business dealings with foreign companies,” campaign spokesperson Cole Wozniak told Fox News Digital.
Wozniak continued: “Rogers made hundreds of thousands of dollars working for companies that partnered with Chinese firms posing ‘national security threats’ to the US, and worked for a Saudi-linked company that pushed for regulations that could have ‘enabled Saudi Arabia to develop nuclear weapons.'”
That is a pointed counterattack, and Rogers has his own history to answer for. But none of it changes the underlying structural reality that a senator — any senator — receives classified access without a formal clearance process. The question is whether the particular senator in question has spent his campaign building a record that would disqualify him from such access if the standard rules applied.
Bryce Poole, a senior legal fellow at Advancing American Freedom, told Fox News Digital that concerns about senators leaking sensitive information are not merely hypothetical. He cited the case of former US Senator Robert Menendez, who was prosecuted and convicted for acting essentially as a foreign agent of Egypt. “It was not that long ago, it was 2024, when Robert Menendez was prosecuted and convicted for being a foreign agent of Egypt essentially and in 2025 I believe he was sentenced to 11 years,” Poole said.
Poole noted that the material Menendez allegedly shared with Egyptian contacts was not necessarily classified — but it was sensitive, non-public information, and that distinction matters less than people think when foreign adversaries are collecting it piece by piece.
What the Michigan Primary Result Tells You About the Democrat Party Right Now
El-Sayed beat Representative Haley Stevens, the establishment-backed candidate, in a primary that saw him vastly outspent. The Democrat Party’s institutional wing backed Stevens. Governor Gretchen Whitmer endorsed Stevens in the final stretch as what observers described as a last-ditch effort to stop El-Sayed. Outside money flooded in against him at a roughly 8-to-1 disadvantage.
He won anyway.
And Chuck Schumer and the rest of the Senate Democrat apparatus now face the same test Michigan’s party leadership did — whether to fall in line behind a nominee whose associations raise legitimate national security questions, or to maintain some distance and risk appearing to fracture the party heading into a consequential midterm cycle.
Compare that to the Texas Senate race, where the Republican establishment — Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the National Republican Senatorial Committee — has withheld the kind of investment typically poured into defending a seat, largely as payback for President Trump’s decision to back Ken Paxton over incumbent John Cornyn in the primary. The Republican establishment appears more comfortable with the prospect of losing a seat than with the election of a MAGA-aligned senator. Democrats face no equivalent hesitation when their nominee wins from the Left. They accommodate. They move on. They write the checks.
El-Sayed supports Medicare for All — a government takeover of American healthcare that would mean rationing, bureaucratic control, and the elimination of patient choice in favor of whatever federal administrators decide people deserve. He has called for abolishing ICE. He supports a Green New Deal-style approach to energy and climate that would drive up costs for working Michigan families while delivering no measurable environmental benefit. These are not merely progressive positions. They are a coherent rejection of constitutional governance in favor of socialist transformation dressed up in public-health language.
And now, on top of all of that, national security experts are warning that placing this particular man in a Senate seat — with the classified-access privilege that comes automatically with it — presents a risk that goes well beyond ordinary partisan disagreement.
The November race against Republican Mike Rogers will determine whether Michigan voters find that combination of associations and policy positions disqualifying. The stakes are not abstract. Senators sit on intelligence committees. They receive briefings. They handle information about ongoing operations, about sources, about vulnerabilities in American defenses. The system trusts them because voters, in theory, have already done the vetting.
In this case, the vetting produced a nominee who has not fully disavowed a man who said America deserved the worst terrorist attack in its history, who shared stages with figures linked to US-designated terrorist organizations, and whose own half-sister publicly celebrated the October 7 massacre.
Whether that record should sit a Senate intelligence briefing is a question Michigan will answer in November.
Sources: Fox News Digital; Bridge Michigan; NBC News; The Associated Press; Ballotpedia