Abdul El-Sayed looked into a CNN camera and said he never, never called for defunding the police.
On a Grand Rapids debate stage, Mike Rogers just made that claim impossible to repeat.
Karoline Leavitt saw what Rogers did – and then she said something on national television that Michigan can't ignore.
Mike Rogers Called El-Sayed a Con Man at the Michigan Senate Debate
The debate at WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids was supposed to be Democrat Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed's first chance to convince Michigan voters he'd moved past a record he'd spent months trying to bury.
Rogers wasn't interested in letting him.
He came out calling El-Sayed a "complete, total fraud and con man" and went straight at the record from the first exchange – El-Sayed's George Soros-linked funding, his ties to Muslim Brotherhood supporters, his call to abolish ICE, and his years of demanding that police be defunded and prisons abolished, positions he quietly deleted from his Twitter history before this campaign ever started.
El-Sayed's response was to pivot to Rogers' Florida home, accusing him of abandoning Michigan for the Sun Belt.
Rogers came right back: El-Sayed and his wife own a home in Dubai. "At least Florida is in the United States," Rogers said.
They were still arguing when the moderator called a commercial break and kept going at each other once the cameras cut.
El-Sayed Called to Defund the Police and Abolish Prisons Then Deleted the Proof
What Rogers laid out is a record El-Sayed has spent this entire campaign trying to outrun.
In 2020, El-Sayed was publicly calling to defund the police – in radio interviews, on his Substack, and on camera for a University of Michigan seminar called Police Brutality in America, where he asked whether police really need to use guns.
"We do need to defund the police," he said in one of those interviews.
Before launching his Senate run, he deleted thousands of tweets – about a dozen of which directly supported the defund movement.
When CNN's Kasie Hunt pressed him, El-Sayed said he deleted them "because I didn't want them to be taken out of context."
He then told CNN he "never, never called for defunding" the police.
From 2019 to 2021, El-Sayed also served on the board of the Sunrise Movement – a far-left organization that publicly called cops "fascist pigs," ran four-day trainings on how to abolish police departments, and declared police and prisons "white supremacist institutions."
He sat on their board through all of it and has never addressed a word of it.
You can delete tweets.
But you cannot delete board membership.
Karoline Leavitt Told Fox News El-Sayed Would Make Michigan Less Safe
After the debate, former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went on Fox News to make sure Michigan heard what Rogers had just put on the record.
She went directly after El-Sayed's strategy of pretending his old positions never existed.
"I had the pleasure of watching Mike Rogers tonight, President Trump's endorsed candidate in Michigan, and he did an exceptional job exposing El-Sayed for the radical, extreme liberal, Democrat, and leftist that he is," Leavitt said.
"He is trying to now modify his positions to appease common sense people in Michigan to earn their vote. But his past positions prove exactly the far-left extremist that he is."
Leavitt then asked Michigan voters to picture what El-Sayed actually believes.
"Imagine a country where we get rid of prisons – where we just release every single murderer and rapist and violent criminal in our country onto the streets," she said.
El-Sayed answered that question in writing before he decided Michigan wasn't supposed to see it.
"It will be a less safe state," Leavitt said of a Michigan with El-Sayed in the Senate. "It will be a more dangerous place for common sense everyday Americans."
Sources:
- Alex Miller, "Surfaced Videos of Dem Senate Candidate Backing 'Defund the Police' Contradict Recent Denials," Fox News, July 8, 2026.
- Washington Free Beacon Staff, "'Fascist Pigs': Michigan Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed Served on Board of Far-Left Group That Smeared Cops," Washington Free Beacon, January 14, 2026.
- Daily Signal Staff, "CNN Calls Out Michigan's El-Sayed for Previous 'Defund the Police' Statements," The Daily Signal, July 15, 2026.
- RNC Rapid Response, "Abdul El-Sayed's 'Defund the Police' Record Comes Back to Haunt Him," GOP.com, July 8, 2026.
- National Review Staff, "Meet Graham Platner 2.0, Michigan's Abdul El-Sayed," National Review, 2026.