The leader of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, Sen. Tim Scott, said in a Sunday interview on CNN that people should believe something Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed supposedly said about himself. But Scott took El-Sayed’s quote out of context. So did an attack ad released last week by the group Scott chairs.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s online ad has generated attention and criticism for using the full legal name of El-Sayed, a Muslim former public health official who is running in Michigan against Republican former congressman Mike Rogers. But the ad is also notable for how, like Scott, it uses a misleadingly snipped “dangerous” comment to bolster its case that El-Sayed is a radical.
In the CNN interview on Sunday, Scott claimed of El-Sayed: “He says he’s the most dangerous candidate you can find. He’s right. We should trust his words, not ours.” The 30-second ad features a one-second video clip of El-Sayed shouting, “I’m pretty damn dangerous” – immediately before turning to an attack on El-Sayed’s stance toward the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early 2010s.
The full video of El-Sayed’s remarks, at a July 25 campaign event during the Democratic primary he won, shows he was arguing that he is an ally to struggling Americans and merely “dangerous” to a list of corporate and political interests he claimed are “rigging our policies against us.” The NRSC ad and Scott’s remark on CNN didn’t acknowledge that the “dangerous” identifier was directed at specific targets, nor that El-Sayed was rejecting the notion that he is broadly “dangerous” to Americans.
