Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Michigan's U.S. Senate seat, acknowledged on CNN that he deleted social media posts supporting the defund-the-police movement, and offered a reason that may raise more questions than it answers. He scrubbed the tweets, he said, so they could not be "taken out of context."
The exchange, which aired on CNN's "The Arena," put the candidate in an uncomfortable position: defending the deletion of his own public statements while simultaneously insisting voters should focus on what he has done rather than what he has said. Host Kasie Hunt pressed El-Sayed directly on the matter, and his responses amounted to a sustained dodge.
Hunt opened the line of questioning by noting that El-Sayed had deleted tweets expressing support for defunding the police during the course of his campaign. She asked him plainly whether he stood by those earlier statements or whether he now believes police should be funded. El-Sayed did not answer the question.
Instead, he pivoted to his tenure leading Wayne County's Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services, where he said he oversaw the rebuilding of a juvenile detention facility and raised worker salaries by 35 percent. He told Hunt:
"So, Kasie, in my time leading Wayne County's Department of Health, Human and Veteran Services, I had the responsibility of rebuilding a juvenile detention facility. I raised salaries 35% for workers there to make sure that the public health emergency that we had to call no longer existed. So, judge me by my work, rather than some deleted tweets."
Hunt did not let it go. She interrupted to ask the obvious follow-up: why did he delete the tweets?
El-Sayed's answer was remarkably direct, and remarkably self-defeating:
"I deleted all the tweets because I didn't want them to be taken out of context like this so that you could distract from the actual conversation that Michiganders really want to have about what they want their leadership to actually fight for them to do."
Consider the logic. El-Sayed says the tweets would be taken "out of context." But he does not explain what the proper context would be. He does not say the tweets were wrong. He does not say his views have changed. He says only that he wanted to prevent exactly the kind of questioning Hunt was doing, which is to say, journalism.
The defund-the-police tweets are not the only posts El-Sayed has quietly removed from public view. The Washington Free Beacon reported that El-Sayed deleted a September 2021 post in which he called Border Patrol agents "white supremacists" and blamed U.S. policy for illegal immigration. That post was captured before deletion.
In the now-deleted post, El-Sayed wrote: "How about asking how our policies decimate Caribbean & Central American (and so many other) countries, and why we allow white supremacists to police our borders?" The Border Patrol agent he was referencing, accused at the time of whipping Haitian migrants, was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing.
El-Sayed's record of deletions extends further. Newsmax reported that he also deleted posts expressing anti-police sentiment, including one from June 2020 in which he called police "standing armies we deploy against our own people." The pattern is consistent: radical statements made in the heat of progressive activism, then quietly erased once a statewide campaign began.
El-Sayed's claims about rebuilding a troubled juvenile jail have also drawn scrutiny, raising questions about whether his preferred "judge me by my work" defense holds up under examination.
When Hunt tried a third time to pin El-Sayed down, asking whether he would fight to defund the police if elected, he launched into a lengthy answer that touched on recruitment, retirement, community violence intervention, behavioral health, anti-poverty measures, and public health. He mentioned everything except a clear answer.
"I've already told you what I did, judge me by my work. I funded the system because it needed to be funded. Too often, the conversation we have is fund or defund. The question that we don't ask is what kind of system do we really want?"
He then turned on the interviewer, dismissing the entire line of questioning as "clickbait in D.C." and insisting that no one in Michigan asks him about defunding the police. He told Hunt the topic is "really nice on CNN, if you want to get clicks."
That framing is convenient but hard to square with the facts. El-Sayed is running for the U.S. Senate in a state where public safety and policing have been central political issues since the 2020 riots. The defund movement cost Democrats dearly in the 2020 and 2022 cycles. Voters in Michigan and across the country punished candidates associated with the slogan. El-Sayed's insistence that no one cares about his position on the issue strains belief.
This is not the first time El-Sayed has faced questions about his past statements. Fox News reported that in a separate CNN appearance with Kaitlan Collins, El-Sayed similarly refused to explain why he deleted the posts or whether his views had changed. In that exchange, he said: "At that time I was a professor... At this point, I'm running for U.S. Senate." In a since-deleted June 2020 post cited in that report, El-Sayed wrote: "Most major US cities spend WAY TOO MUCH on police departments to police poverty."
The Free Beacon also reported that El-Sayed sent a fundraising email on the second anniversary of the October 7 Hamas attack that made no mention of Hamas's atrocities and instead blamed Israel. He has reportedly called both Israel and Hamas "evil."
El-Sayed's strategy on CNN, delete the evidence, then demand to be judged on your record, assumes that voters will accept a candidate's self-curated version of his own history. But that assumption is fragile when the candidate has a documented habit of scrubbing inconvenient statements.
The candidate has faced separate scrutiny over questions about his professional credentials, adding another layer to concerns about whether his public presentation matches the underlying record.
His response to Hunt also revealed a telling instinct. Rather than own the tweets, explain them, or repudiate them, El-Sayed chose to blame the media for asking. He cast the interviewer as a distraction and framed his own deleted words as irrelevant. That is not accountability. That is the opposite of accountability.
El-Sayed's case also fits a broader pattern within the Democratic Party, where candidates who embraced the most progressive positions during the 2020 protest era now find those positions politically toxic. The Michigan frontrunner's record on criminal justice has drawn additional questions that cut in the same direction.
Some Democrats have been candid about the party's leftward drift. Senator John Fetterman publicly accused his own party of moving toward radical positions after socialist candidates swept primaries in New York. El-Sayed's approach is different: rather than confront the problem, he deletes the evidence and hopes no one notices.
The central question Hunt asked remains unanswered. Does Abdul El-Sayed support defunding the police, or does he not? He tweeted in favor of it. He deleted those tweets. He will not say whether his views have changed. He will not explain what "context" would make those tweets acceptable. He will only say: look at what I did, not what I said.
But what a candidate says, and what he tries to hide, tells voters something important about what he would do with power. El-Sayed's deleted tweets did not vanish because they were misunderstood. They vanished because they were understood perfectly well, and the candidate knew it.
Michigan voters heading into a Senate race deserve a candidate who will say what he believes and stand behind it. Deleting your record is not leadership. It is a confession that you know your record cannot survive daylight.
