On October 15, a man named T.J. Wolfgram — the independent and conservative outreach captain for Michigan Democrat Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed — sat down for what he thought was a private conversation. A hidden camera was rolling. When the subject of the Muslim Brotherhood came up, Wolfgram didn't flinch.
"I don't have any issue with the Muslim Brotherhood," he said.
Wolfgram's job, specifically, is to persuade voters outside El-Sayed's base that the candidate is mainstream enough to earn their vote. The footage suggests a different internal assessment of those voters.
"It's because Americans are idiots," Wolfgram said on camera, explaining why the Muslim Brotherhood's reputation is a political problem. Not a policy disagreement. Not a messaging challenge. Americans are simply too stupid to understand.
When pressed on whether an El-Sayed victory would embolden problematic leaders in Muslim communities, Wolfgram didn't deny it. "Is it going to embolden problematic leaders in some Muslim community? Yes," he said. His follow-up: "Probably one fold. And what the f*ck are they going to do anyways?"
Watch the hidden camera footage here
The attitude tracks with El-Sayed's own record. In 2012, El-Sayed signed a letter supporting Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi — a Muslim Brotherhood member — that called for "purging of the media and the police." That letter has been public for years. The campaign has never disavowed it. Wolfgram's comments on hidden camera aren't a contradiction of El-Sayed's public positions. They're a confirmation of the private ones.
El-Sayed is running against Republican nominee Mike Rogers in a race that was already drawing national scrutiny over the candidate's Islamist ties. The campaign's defense will be that a staffer's private comments don't reflect the candidate. That defense requires believing the man El-Sayed personally hired to win over conservative and independent voters was freelancing when he defended the Muslim Brotherhood and called the electorate idiots.
"Realistically...exactly what he says right now is not nearly as important," Wolfgram said of his own candidate's public statements. The outreach captain, on tape, telling a stranger that the candidate's words don't matter. That what El-Sayed says publicly is performance. That the real priorities are somewhere else.
The conservative outreach captain's pitch to conservatives, when he thought nobody was recording: your concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood are wrong, you're too dumb to know better, and it doesn't matter what the candidate tells you anyway.
