Abdul El-Sayed's deleted tweets on 9/11 invite scrutiny of past remarks

As the nation prepares to mark 25 years since Sept. 11, 2001, Abdul El-Sayed , the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, may be facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack.

El-Sayed is a leader of a new crop of candidates from a wing of his party that opposed American wars and capitalized on anger over anti-Arab sentiment in a state with a robust and active Muslim community. But now he is attempting to adapt — and in some cases delete — past statements that may run afoul of a broad, general election audience.

As El-Sayed heads into the fall general election campaign against Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, El-Sayed, a former public health official, has already been forced to distance himself from the views of Hasan Piker, a popular Twitch streamer who has appeared at El-Sayed's campaign events and who generated controversy for declaring that "America deserved 9/11" before later retracting the remark.

Meanwhile, El-Sayed's past references to the deadly attacks have continued to surface, including two deleted social media posts verified by CBS News that have not been previously reported. In those posts, he calls for the American public to muster the same outrage for the COVID-19 death toll that they displayed after 9/11.

In one, from April 2020, El-Sayed compared the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on Sept. 11 to the mounting COVID-19 death toll and argued for a response commensurate with the nation's post-9/11 mobilization. In another, El-Sayed wrote that because more Americans had died from COVID than in the Sept. 11 attacks, he hoped "that means we'll spend the next ten years fighting a war for public health & against poverty ... like we launched a global #WaronTerror after 9/11. We could save lives rather than take them."

"Abdul has always unequivocally condemned terrorism and the September 11 attacks," a spokesperson for El-Sayed's campaign said in a statement to CBS News. "Mike Rogers' attempts to misrepresent Abdul's beliefs are bad-faith lies meant to mislead Michiganders."

In another deleted post, first reported by the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed wrote on Sept. 11, 2021: "Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my faith. Tomorrow, I'll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetuated ignorantly in the name of my country."

El-Sayed's campaign told Politico earlier this summer that he deleted all posts older than July 2023 "to prevent any old posts from being taken out of context." They didn't say when he deleted the posts.

For El-Sayed, the emergence of old social media posts could present a unique challenge, said Adrian Hemond, a bipartisan political consultant based in Lansing.

"El-Sayed has what I call a 'Quacks like a duck problem,'" Hemond said.