Michigan Democratic Senate Candidate

Exclusive audio: Michigan's left-wing Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed told staffers he wanted to avoid making a public statement about the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei because "there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad" via @alanagoodman @FreeBeacon…

— Eliana Johnson (@elianayjohnson) March 30, 2026

… assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—or taking any public position on it at all—because "there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad" about his death, according to audio from a private campaign strategy call obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

If reporters pressed him to take a position, he said, he would change the subject to Donald Trump's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. "I'm just gonna go straight to pedophilia, frankly," El-Sayed said. "I'll just be like, 'Pedophile president decides that he doesn't like the front page news, so he decides to take us into another war.'"

"We have the moral high ground here," the candidate said, adding that reporters would "try and bait us into saying, 'Yeah, but isn't it justified now that they took [Khamenei] out, right? And I just think, for us, we've got to be, like, 'no.'"