Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has presented a carefully shaped family story on the campaign trail, highlighting his white stepmother while making little public mention of his biological mother, who has been linked in court records to an organization designated as a terrorist group. The Post can reveal that El-Sayed nevertheless remains close to his “ummi,” or mother.
His biological mother, Fatten Elkomy, 66, is a psychiatric nurse at New Horizons Community Support Services in Columbia, Missouri. Born in Alexandria, Egypt, she previously worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency, which the US government designated as a terrorist organization, according to 2010 federal court documents that named her.
Elkomy was also involved in activism with the Muslim Brotherhood while living in Egypt during the 1970s, according to a social media post by her daughter, Eman Abdelhadi, El-Sayed’s half-sister. The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist political movement that has been designated a terrorist organization by some governments and has sought to establish sharia law in Muslim-majority countries.
El-Sayed’s white stepmother, former Jacqueline Johnson, 63, is a Lansing-born mechanical engineer and appears to feature more prominently in his public biography. She and her parents—El-Sayed’s step-grandparents—have appeared in two key campaign videos that were promoted heavily and used in fundraising appeals.
“I wasn’t raised by my mother,” El-Sayed said this week while being questioned by NBC Nightly News. He is campaigning to become the first Muslim senator in US history.
Away from the campaign trail, however, El-Sayed has spoken warmly about his biological mother, including praising her “uncompromising . . . way of doing things.”
El-Sayed was 3 when his parents separated, but Elkomy has remained involved in his adult life. She attended his 2014 graduation from Columbia University’s Medical School, where photographs show the pair smiling alongside Abdelhadi.
In his 2020 book, “Healing Politics: A Doctor’s Journey into the Heart of Our Political Epidemic,” El-Sayed described his birth mother as “loving” and “devoted.”
“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 mother and father.
That same year, he sent Abdelhadi money through Venmo for a “Mama’s bday gift.”
On this past Mother’s Day, he also disclosed that he had called Elkomy to wish her well. In a post on X, he referred to her by her first name rather than using her surname.
“Without you, I would not have been a mother,” Elkomy told him emotionally during the call.
“Enjoy the day, and we’ll see you soon, ok?” El-Sayed replied. “Love you, Mama.”
Elkomy could not be reached for comment.
She has made no public appearances on the campaign trail.
Aside from the Mother’s Day post, which did not show her face or include her last name, Elkomy received only a brief mention at a September 2025 campaign stop in Lansing promoting “Medicare for All.” During the event, El-Sayed said, “my mother is a psychiatric nurse practitioner and my wife is a psychiatrist,” without identifying which mother he meant.
By contrast, a campaign video shared in June carried the caption, “I proudly endorse this message from my grandparents,” accompanied by a heart emoji. In the clip, his white step-grandparents offer a strong endorsement and note that their US “roots trace back to the early 1800s.”
“Where did Abdul El-Sayed come from?” his step-grandmother, Judy Johnson, asks in the advertisement. “Here!” she exclaims, referring to Michigan. “We’re his grandparents!” she continues. “He buys us groceries every week. . . . Take it from us. We love him and so will you.”
A second video posted by El-Sayed in July featured his stepmother, who adopted Johnson as her married surname and converted to Islam after marrying El-Sayed’s father. In the footage, her hijab is largely concealed beneath a broad straw hat as she and El-Sayed speak on a porch about his qualities as a candidate.
“We are a society of immigrants, we are just people . . . you care about people,” Johnson says, pointing to 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.
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“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.
