Mike Rogers wants Abdul El-Sayed to answer for the Muslim Brotherhood. Before Michigan voters accept his prosecution of his opponent, they should examine the former congressman’s own record.
In 2012, Rogers publicly acknowledged that the United States would need to engage with certain Muslim Brotherhood members. Later that year, when asked whether Washington should cut off assistance to Egypt under its Brotherhood-led government, he resisted an immediate cutoff.
Today, Rogers portrays El-Sayed’s past support for Egypt’s elected president as evidence of a dangerous ideology. His argument demands a question he has yet to adequately answer: Why does his own record deserve context while his opponent’s becomes grounds for suspicion?
The evidence begins with Rogers’s own words.
In June 2012, while serving as Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rogers told Reuters: “Do I think there are moderate Muslim Brotherhood individuals we are going to have to reach out to and talk to? Yes.”
He followed that acknowledgment with a warning that Washington would need to watch carefully. His position was cautious, and he raised concerns about extremism. Nevertheless, he explicitly accepted engagement with some Brotherhood members as a necessary part of American foreign policy.
Rogers understood that dealing with Egypt required distinctions: between individuals, between political movements and governments, and between diplomatic contact and ideological allegiance.
Those distinctions matter just as much when the subject is his political opponent.
On September 11, 2012, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked Rogers whether he was ready to cut off American assistance to Egypt given its new Muslim Brotherhood-led government. Rogers declined to endorse an immediate withdrawal. He argued that the United States needed to consider whether leaving would sacrifice influence and that assistance could provide leverage for obtaining security commitments.
That exchange does not prove Rogers personally collaborated with Brotherhood leaders. It does establish that he defended maintaining American influence and resisted immediately cutting assistance to a country governed by a Brotherhood president.
That is a substantial record for someone now treating another American’s position on that same period as evidence of ideological danger.
The United States itself was working with Mohamed Morsi’s government. President Barack Obama congratulated Morsi on his election victory on June 24, 2012, and expressed an interest in cooperation while supporting Egypt’s transition to democracy. The American government accepted that it would have to conduct relations with the government Egyptian voters had elected.
None of this places Morsi’s government beyond criticism. Nor does it make El-Sayed’s past statements immune from scrutiny. Rogers is entitled to question the substance of a letter El-Sayed signed or challenge his judgment about Egypt.
But he owes voters an honest account of the historical setting—and his own place in it.
El-Sayed signed a 2012 statement supporting Morsi, Egypt’s elected president. PolitiFact’s review distinguished that statement from a pledge of allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood as an organization. Rogers’s campaign has presented a much broader accusation, describing El-Sayed as having a history of supporting the Brotherhood and embracing a dangerous ideology.
Supporting diplomatic engagement, preserving assistance and signing a political statement are different acts. They should be examined on their individual merits. But the difference does not give Rogers permission to grant himself the benefit of historical context while stripping it from El-Sayed.
The chronology also matters. The American branch-specific terrorist designations announced in January 2026 came roughly fourteen years after the statements at issue. They targeted the Egyptian, Jordanian and Lebanese branches through specified legal authorities. Those later actions cannot honestly be presented as though the same designations governed the American debate in 2012.
Rogers knows how consequential such distinctions are. He chaired the House Intelligence Committee. Precision was part of his responsibility.
His handling of El-Sayed’s recent disavowal makes the double standard harder to dismiss.
At an October town hall, El-Sayed agreed to disavow the Brotherhood, then challenged the premise that his Muslim faith made his allegiance to the Constitution suspect. Rogers subsequently insisted that El-Sayed had failed to disavow it. PolitiFact reviewed the exchange and rated Rogers’s claim false.
A candidate can disagree with an opponent’s explanation. He can demand answers about particular statements. He cannot fairly erase an answer because it undermines his attack.
Rogers’s experience should make him capable of a serious argument about Egypt, political Islam and American security. Instead, his campaign’s framing invites voters to draw sweeping conclusions about El-Sayed while leaving Rogers’s own support for engagement conveniently outside the picture.
The hypocrisy lies there. Rogers once recognized that American interests required a careful approach to Brotherhood figures and the government they led. He now owes his opponent the same careful distinctions he would undoubtedly demand for himself.
Before Rogers delivers another lecture about El-Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood, he should explain his own words from 2012—and why Michigan voters should apply one standard to him and another to the man he wants to defeat.
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