A CBS News correspondent apologized and deleted a social media post after praising a man who pressed Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood during a town hall.
Jan Crawford, CBS News’ chief legal correspondent, wrote Sunday: “Earlier, I tweeted a video from an Abdul El-Sayed town hall. I deleted that tweet because it was a violation of CBS News standards. I apologize.”
In the deleted post, Crawford had heaped praise on a man identified only as “Tommy” who asked El-Sayed to denounce the terror-designated Islamist group at the town hall. “Tommy, thank you. I had to watch this twice to catch Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s nanosecond ‘yeah absolutely’ response,” Crawford wrote alongside a re-post of the viral video. “His subsequent uninterrupted three-minute diatribe proving your exact point is the kind of spectacular self own [sic] most ppl [sic] only dream about triggering. Congrats.”
El-Sayed, a Democrat running for the open Senate seat, faces Republican Mike Rogers, a former House Intelligence Committee chairman and ex-FBI special agent who has sought to tie El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood on the campaign trail.
At the town hall, Tommy asked El-Sayed point-blank to disavow the group. “Sure. Yeah, absolutely,” El-Sayed answered — then spent close to five minutes challenging the question itself.
“Why are you asking the question?” El-Sayed asked Tommy. “Well, because they’re a terrorist group,” Tommy replied. El-Sayed pressed further: “But what are you implying? Do you assume that I wouldn’t?” Tommy answered, “Yes … because I have not heard you disavow them yet.”
El-Sayed then turned the exchange toward his own identity. “You’re asking the question because implicitly you assume that I’ll have dual loyalties, right?” he said. “You assume, Tommy, that because I am Muslim, that somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution.”
He drew a comparison to John F. Kennedy, the nation’s first Catholic president. “When he ran for president, he was asked whether or not he was going to have allegiance to the Pope at the Vatican because, of course, he’s Catholic, and his answer, famously, was that he was not running to be a Catholic president,” El-Sayed said. “He was running to be president and happened to be Catholic. I’m not running to be a Muslim senator. I’m running for the US Senate and happen to be Muslim.”
Crawford’s deleted post drew heavy backlash online even after she apologized, with critics accusing her of racism and Islamophobia and others pointing out that the post violated CBS’s own standards requiring reporters to stay neutral toward political candidates. Crawford joined CBS News in 2009 after stints at ABC News, PBS and the Chicago Tribune.
The Michigan Senate race is one of the most closely watched in the country. El-Sayed is campaigning on Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, ending U.S. aid to Israel, and new taxes on millionaires and billionaires.
