00:00So there's another interesting allegation surrounding the Democratic candidate for
00:04Senate from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed.
00:06This one involving a charity that his father, Mohammed El-Sayed, has served on the board
00:11of for several years.
00:13Mohammed El-Sayed has been a board member of Life for Relief and Development since
00:172020, at least.
00:19Life for Relief and Development has a long history of drawing from Muslim donors.
00:22And in 2004, at the height of the US invasion of Iraq, Life for Relief and Development's
00:27Baghdad office was raided, and soldiers found boxes of evidence and rings of documents
00:33suggesting that the charity, which was supposed to help the needy and the disadvantaged, had
00:38actually been funneling donors' money via the nation of Jordan to the regime of the
00:43since-deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
00:45That evidence kicked off a long-running criminal and civil case against the group that only
00:50concluded in 2014, when Life for Relief and Development paid a settlement of around $780,000.
00:57Now, during that investigation, federal investigators also found ties between Life for Relief and
01:01Development and the Islamic African Relief Agency, another charity suspected of funneling
01:07support for bad actors in the Middle East, specifically Hamas, and a charity for which
01:13Abdul El-Sayed's mother happened to be employed for a short time.
01:17Now, this is just the latest example of El-Sayed, or members of his family, being accused of being
01:23linked to unscrupulous actors with ties to the Middle East, ties to Islamic extremists, and
01:29ties to out-and-out terror groups.
01:31He's spent most of the past few weeks trying to deflect and answer charges that he is at
01:37least a supporter of, if not an out-and-out member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
01:41Now, the Muslim Brotherhood has been active in the Middle East for around a century.
01:44It's a very powerful political Islam group that has been linked to the rise of Hamas,
01:51which emerged from several Brotherhood-linked charities in the Gaza Strip in the late 1980s.
01:55Most recently, in 2012, El-Sayed drew unwanted attention when he turned out to have signed
02:00a letter supporting the Muslim Brotherhood during a crackdown by the Egyptian government during
02:06unrest in that country that was part of the Arab Spring.
02:08Now, there's no evidence that Muhammad El-Sayed was involved in the actions of Life for Relief
02:14and Development in giving money to Saddam Hussein.
02:16But, the latest claims show that there are real questions that El-Sayed has to answer
02:21about who he will actually represent in the U.S. Senate should he win next week.
02:26Will he represent the people of the state of Michigan, which does have one of the largest
02:30Arab populations in the U.S., but also has a bunch of other concerns related to the economy
02:35and energy, or will he use his power for the next six years to focus purely on issues of
02:41the Middle East, thousands of miles away from his nominal constituents?
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