Rogers also falsely linked El-Sayed to 9/11 comments after primary
The fundraising email, sent Sunday and first reported by journalist Azi Paybarah, opens by framing Rogers’ background in national security terms. “When I served as a US army officer and an FBI special agent, I swore a sacred oath to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Rogers wrote, according to a screenshot of the email shared by Paybarah, a former Washington Post reporter now with Straight Arrow News. “I dedicated my life to keeping our families safe – working in the shadows, hunting down terrorists, and standing on the frontlines of our national security.”
The email then added, in a section highlighted in bold type: “I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America.”
Rogers was not in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 1, 2011, when Bin Laden was shot and killed in an American military raid on his compound. He was also not in the White House Situation Room, where Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other senior officials followed the operation in real time. Rogers, who was chair of the House intelligence committee, was at his home in Washington, D.C., where he was informed about the raid in a phone call from CIA Director Panetta, according to Rogers’ own public comments the following day and a campaign video.
The Rogers campaign did not respond to requests to explain what the former congressman meant by his claim, according to the Guardian. Paybarah suggested Rogers must have been referring to the fact that he was one of a select few U.S. officials to have seen a photograph of Bin Laden’s dead body.
Rogers said days after the raid that the photograph he had seen made it clear Bin Laden was dead. He said at the same time that he supported Obama’s decision not to make the graphic images of the raid public. “The risks of release outweigh the benefits,” Rogers said in a statement at the time. “Conspiracy theorists around the world will just claim the photos are doctored anyway, and there is a real risk that releasing the photos will only serve to inflame public opinion in the Middle East.”
In the years since, Rogers has frequently referred to his role as a congressman who helped provide funds for U.S. intelligence agencies in vague terms that appeared to exaggerate his involvement, the Guardian reported.
Since Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim doctor and former public health official, became his Democratic opponent, Rogers has repeatedly cited his own role in the U.S. war on Islamist terrorism in campaign statements. On the night El-Sayed won the Democratic primary, Rogers said: “Abdul doesn’t represent a vision for the future. He’s leading a movement grounded in ideological fanaticism. I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11.”
A New York Times fact-check found the second half of Rogers’ statement false: it was not El-Sayed but one of his supporters, the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who once said that America deserved 9/11. Piker retracted and apologized for that statement seven years before he endorsed El-Sayed.
El-Sayed has repeatedly and clearly denounced the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In a recollection of the day written in 2021, El-Sayed wrote: “I watched terrorists with names like mine attack my country in the name of my faith. Three thousand of my fellow Americans were killed in the craven terrorist attacks in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania. The attack devastated me.”
The Rogers email lands as the Michigan Senate race enters its general election phase. MSI previously reported that El-Sayed has concentrated roughly two-thirds of his post-primary television ad spending on a family-roots spot, and that the Rogers–El-Sayed matchup was set after El-Sayed won the Democratic primary over Rep. Haley Stevens.