Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed acknowledged Saturday night his sister-in-law was on the federal terrorist watchlist during President Barack Obama’s term in office but said she was removed in 2016.
The revelation surfaced when Fox News senior correspondent Mike Tobin confronted the candidate in a hallway about court documents identifying his sister-in-law, Mariam Jukaku, as a plaintiff in a 2016 lawsuit challenging her alleged placement on the list officially known as as the Terrorist Screening Dataset.
Tobin specifically asked, “There’s reporting in a lawsuit that now backs it up. And documentation with the lawsuit that Mariam Jukaku, who’s your sister-in-law, that she was on the terrorist watch list?”
“Yeah,” El-Sayed responded, according a report by Fox News.
El-Sayed then vigorously defended Jukaku, claiming she had committed no wrongdoing and pivoted turning toward his rival, Republican Senate candidate Rogers
“She did nothing wrong and was captured on that and then sued and got off,” El-Sayed said. “You’ve got this system where folks are guilty until proven innocent because they’ve got different kinds of names, because of the infrastructure that people like Mike Rogers set up.”
He also implied the list was faulty, claiming a “child” was on the same registry as well.
However, it was the Obama administration that apparently put his sister-in-law on the list, which presents a awkward coincidence with former President Barack Obama expected to campaign alongside El-Sayed in Michigan on October 24.
According to the 2016 lawsuit, Jukaku claimed she underwent extensive airport screening in 2012 without ever being told she had been flagged on the list.
“The filing said she was believed to have been removed from the watchlist by 2016,” Fox News reported.
El-Sayed said she sued and won, but a federal appeals court overturned that ruling which favored Jukaku and the other plaintiffs in 2021. A separate lawsuit seeking damages was dismissed in 2017, according to Fox.
That reporting cast some doubt on El-Sayed’s claim that she “sued and won” as in the appellate court the plaintiff’s did not prevail, the Fox report implied.
The FBI would not report on Jukaku’s past or present status.
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“It is the U.S. government’s policy to neither confirm nor deny a person’s inclusion in the Terrorist Screening Dataset, commonly known as the terrorist watchlist,” the agency told Fox News.
El-Sayed has had to defend himself against other attempts by Rogers and conservative commentators to tie him to Muslim terrorist movements.
Earlier this fall he faced allegations about his family’s purported connections the Muslim Brotherhood, which the U.S. and several Middle Eastern countries officially designate as a terrorist organization.
The candidate’s campaign has characterized such allegations “racist and untrue.”
Rogers on Saturday called them “disqualifying.”
“The watchlist lawsuit does not establish wrongdoing by Jukaku or El-Sayed,” Fox reported.
Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the author of the New York Times true crime best seller House of Secrets and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
