Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has carefully curated a family narrative for the campaign trail that erases his terror group-linked birth mother for his white stepmom — even though he remains close to his “ummi,” The Post can reveal.
Biological mom Fatten Elkomy, 66, a psychiatric nurse at New Horizons Community Support Services in Columbia, MO, was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and previously worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency — a designated terrorist organization — according to 2010 federal court documents naming her.
While in Egypt in the 1970s, she was an activist with the Muslim Brotherhood — a terror-designated Islamist political movement seeking to establish sharia rule in Muslim-majority countries — according to a social media post from her own daughter, Eman Abdelhadi, El-Sayed’s half-sister.
His white stepmother, the former Jacqueline Johnson, 63, a Lansing-born mechanical engineer, is apparently far more palatable to Michigan voters. She and her parents, El-Sayed’s step-grandparents, were trotted out in two key videos the campaign has heavily promoted and even used for fundraising appeals.
“I wasn’t raised by my mother,” El-Sayed insisted this week when he was grilled by NBC Nightly News, as he campaigns to become the first Muslim senator in US history.
Yet when he’s not on the campaign trail, El-Sayed speaks affectionately of his birth mother, even praising her “uncompromising . . . way of doing things.”
The Michigan candidate was 3 when his parents separated, but Elkomy has remained closely involved in her son’s adult life — including attending his 2014 graduation from Columbia University’s Medical School, where the two are pictured sharing a beaming smile as they stand next to each other, along with Abdelhadi.
El-Sayed described his birth mother as “loving” and “devoted” in his 2020 book, “Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic.”
“Both are strong-willed, charismatic, charming — and both are uncompromising, not only in their beliefs, but also in their approaches to life and their way of doing things,” he wrote of his mom and dad.
That year, he sent Abdelhadi money on Venmo for “Mama’s bday gift.”
And this past Mother’s Day, he revealed he had called her to wish her well, deliberately referring to her only by her first name in a post on X.
“Without you, I would not have been a mother,” Elkomy tells him emotionally in the call.
“Enjoy the day, and we’ll see you soon, ok?” El-Sayed responded. “Love you, Mama.”
Elkomy could not be reached for comment.
She made no public appearances on the campaign trail.
Besides the Mother’s Day post that didn’t show her face or her last name, the only passing reference came at a September 2025 Lansing stop promoting “Medicare for All,” where El-Sayed said, “my mother is a psychiatric nurse practitioner and my wife is a psychiatrist,” without identifying her.
Meanwhile, in a June campaign video he captioned, “I proudly endorse this message from my grandparents,” with a heart emoji, his white step-grandparents give him a ringing endorsement, with the clip noting their US “roots trace back to the early 1800s.”
“Where did Abdul El-Sayed come from?” asks his step-grandmother Judy Johnson in the ad. “Here!” she exclaims, referring to the Great Lakes State. “We’re his grandparents!” she goes on. “He buys us groceries every week. . . . Take it from us. We love him and so will you.”
Another video he shared in July featured his stepmother, who took El-Sayed for her married name and converted to Islam when she married El-Sayed’s father. In the clip, Johnson’s hijab is carefully hidden underneath a large straw hat, as the two chat on a porch about what El-Sayed brings to the table.
“We are a society of immigrants, we are just people . . . you care about people,” she says, noting El-Sayed’s medical background. “If we could see each other as people, that’s very important.”
“Even if you didn’t always know what it was like to be a darkly-complexion kid with a funny name, you brought that empathy of knowing what it was like to be different,” El-Sayed tells her, before the two share an awkward hug.
His family ties are not the only facet of his campaign consistently evolving, according to critics — El-Sayed has also bent over backwards to shed the socialist label, stridently insisting he’s a “capitalist” despite endorsements from socialist powerhouses like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), “Squad” Rep. Alexandria-Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), who pledged $1 million to his campaign and joined him at three Michigan stops this week.
“Abdul El-Sayed has taken pains to hide his own terrorist-connected mother from public view because he knows her ties to Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, and Hamas are indefensible,” said RNC Spokesman Hunter Lovell. “If El-Sayed can’t be honest about his family’s troubling ties to terrorism, how can Michiganders trust him to have their best interests at heart?”
In addition to his family connections, El-Sayed signed a 2012 open letter calling on the Muslim Brotherhood to “purge” the press and police after the radical group seized control of Egypt, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
“Looking at his organizational connections, his family connections, his background is consistent with what one would expect from somebody with close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Kyle Shideler, director of Homeland Security and Counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy.
Shideler noted both El-Sayed and his wife, Sarah Jukaku, were high-ranking officers during their undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan’s Muslim Students Association chapter, which was identified in a Muslim Brotherhood strategy memo among “organizations and friends” in North America.
“Muslim Brotherhood members typically keep things within the family. Membership will be something that passes on from father to son, mother to daughter. It’s very often common for them to intermarry. It often becomes their whole social circle.”
“He’s a Muslim Brotherhood guy, 100%,” President Trump said Thursday during a lunch in the White House Rose Garden.
“How about having him be on the Senate Intelligence Committee? How about that? The guy’s 100% Muslim Brotherhood. . . . He’s a fraud. He’s a con man.”
Even NBC confronted El-Sayed Wednesday on whether he lied about his family’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood — a claim that has become increasingly difficult for the candidate to defend.
“Are you serious?” El-Sayed responded. “I have no ties. We have no ties,” he claimed, before accusing his critics of being Islamophobic.
“I have never had these conversations with my mother. I wasn’t raised by my mother,” he purported. “You’re using hearsay evidence from a tweet. It’s not serious. It’s just not serious.”
“Are you insinuating that somehow I was lying? I’m telling you I was not,” he went on, visibly agitated.
El-Sayed even cried racism during a campaign stop Thursday with AOC.
“I’m not supposed to run for office, I know that, alright? I got the wrong name for that,” he lamented.
“El-Sayed’s denials must also be considered in the broader context of how the Muslim Brotherhood operates,” warned Mariam Wahba, analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and expert on the movement.
“It operates through a wider ecosystem of sympathizers, political allies, and individuals who share its worldview without necessarily holding an official position or carrying a membership card.”
El Sayed’s mom worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency from 1999 through at least 2004. She was named 14 times in federal court documents filed in the US District Court in Missouri in 2010, documenting her participation in eight wire transfers to the Middle East.
The Islamic American Relief Agency was designated a terrorist organization by the Treasury Department in 2004 for funding Al Qaeda and Hamas, accused of funneling “hundreds of thousands of dollars” to Osama Bin Laden” before 9/11.
Abdelhadi wrote in a 2012 post on X, “Had an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college #respect.”
She also wrote that “my family has long been MB.” The Egyptian branch of the brotherhood was designated a foreign terror group earlier this year by the State Department.
“The Brotherhood wants to position itself as the leaders of Muslim Americans, which in turn gives them political power. It wants to prevent Muslim Americans from assimilating into American culture,” said Shideler. “It wants to use political power in the United States to support activities abroad.”
“Ultimately, at the end of the day, its big picture goal is to impose Islamic law on all nations everywhere and establish a caliphate.”
El-Sayed’s campaign did not return The Post’s request for comment.