El-Sayed, Rogers, and the Misattributed 9/11 Claim

Claims at a Glance

Claim	Verdict
"Abdul El-Sayed believes America deserved 9/11"	False
"Mike Rogers tied Abdul El-Sayed to Twitch streamer Hasan Piker's 9/11 comments"	True

Both claims concern the same event: Rogers' August 5, 2026 general-election attack on El-Sayed, made one day after El-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic Senate primary. They require separate rulings because they ask different questions.

Who Said What, and When

Rogers' statement (August 5, 2026)

The day after El-Sayed's primary victory, Rogers released this statement kicking off the general election campaign:^[1]

"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." Mike Rogers, August 5, 2026

Rogers did not quote El-Sayed. He did not identify the source of the belief he was attributing to his opponent. PolitiFact traced the attribution to a 2019 Twitch livestream by Hasan Piker, a progressive political streamer and nephew of Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks.^[2]

Piker's original statement (August 2019)

During a Twitch broadcast in August 2019, Piker said: "America deserved 9/11, dude. F— it, I'm saying it." The comment came during a discussion of U.S. foreign policy and representative Dan Crenshaw's military record.^[3]

After significant backlash, Piker walked back the remarks in an interview with Uygur. He said: "I know that I was inappropriate" and "I should've used more precise and better use of the language there." He characterized the statement as failed satire — a critique of U.S. foreign policy choices he argues contributed to the conditions that enabled the attack. He also drew a semantic distinction between "America" (the state) and "Americans" (the people), saying he "didn't mean that Americans deserved to die" in a 2026 Associated Press statement.^[4] Whether that distinction holds is a reasonable debate; the relevant fact for this ruling is that neither the original words nor the clarification came from El-Sayed.

El-Sayed's Stated Position

El-Sayed campaigned with Piker at Michigan college campuses in April 2026 and appeared with him at a pool party the night before the August 4 primary. On April 7, 2026, El-Sayed appeared on Fox & Friends and was asked directly about Piker's 9/11 comment. He said: "Of course I don't think 9/11 was justified." He also said: "Because you appear with somebody doesn't mean you agree with him on everything."^[2]

In a separate Fox News appearance on "The Will Cain Show," pressed further on the association, El-Sayed said: "Because he said something one time, you think I automatically believe that," calling the questioning a "gotcha game."^[5]

When asked whether he would disavow Piker's past comments, El-Sayed declined. He told Politico: "This whole gotcha game, platform policing, cancel culture — I thought we were over it." He also said: "I'm not here to disavow people's views."^[6]

Claim-by-Claim Analysis

Claim 1: "Abdul El-Sayed believes America deserved 9/11"

The steelman for a softer verdict would note that El-Sayed repeatedly campaigned with Piker throughout 2026 after Piker's 9/11 comment was widely known, and declined every invitation to condemn it. Some voters reasonably interpret sustained association and non-condemnation as tacit acceptance. That interpretation makes for a legitimate political argument.

But Rogers' claim is about El-Sayed's beliefs, not his political associations. He said El-Sayed "believes" something, and the record contains no support for that claim. El-Sayed's own on-camera statements contradict it directly. The adversarial case for "Mixed" does not score above a 2 out of 5: it addresses association, not the attributed belief. The verdict stands: False.

Claim 2: "Mike Rogers tied Abdul El-Sayed to Twitch streamer Hasan Piker's 9/11 comments"

Whether the tie was fair or accurate is answered by Claim 1. Claim 2 asks only whether Rogers made the connection, and he did.^[7][8]

The Better Question

The two claims frame this as a binary: either El-Sayed said a thing, or Rogers made a connection. Both questions are answerable. But neither gets at what voters in Michigan most need to weigh.

The better question is: Should El-Sayed's sustained choice to campaign alongside Piker — while consistently declining to condemn his 9/11 remark — factor into voters' assessment of his judgment?

This question does not have a clean verdict. The competing positions are both coherent:

El-Sayed's case: Piker's Twitch audience numbers in the millions, skews young, and has shown it can move primary votes — Piker-backed candidates flipped Democratic incumbents in Colorado and Wisconsin in 2026. Campaigning alongside someone with shared views on economic policy and the war in Gaza does not require endorsing everything that person has said over seven years. The demand for a ritual disavowal is a media convention that often matters more inside newsrooms than to actual voters.

The challenge: El-Sayed did not just decline to disavow Piker once. He appeared with Piker at a pool party the night before the primary, four months after the 9/11 controversy became campaign news. He has framed the disavowal request itself as an exercise in bad faith ("cancel culture," "gotcha game") rather than a legitimate civic question. Calling the request bad-faith rather than simply saying the 9/11 comment was wrong is a substantive political choice, not a mere rhetorical deflection.

Rogers chose to collapse this nuanced debate into a direct false attribution. That collapse earned him a "Pants on Fire" rating. But the collapse also let him avoid a harder argument he could have made more accurately — that El-Sayed's non-condemnation is itself a political stance deserving scrutiny.

Stakes and Context: The Michigan Race

Michigan's U.S. Senate seat became open when incumbent Gary Peters (D) announced his retirement. The 2026 general election takes place November 3, 2026 — 87 days from this writing — and is considered a competitive contest in a battleground state.

El-Sayed won the August 4 Democratic primary over Rep. Haley Stevens in a narrow victory that called for more than 12 hours after polls closed. He overcame a roughly $65 million outside-spending advantage, including more than $30 million from a group affiliated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee backing Stevens. El-Sayed is a physician, Rhodes Scholar, and former director of the Detroit Health Department. He is Muslim-American.^[9]

Rogers is a former U.S. Army officer, FBI Special Agent, and seven-term congressman who chaired the House Intelligence Committee. He lost the 2024 Michigan Senate race to Elissa Slotkin by approximately 19,000 votes. He ran uncontested in the 2026 Republican primary.^[7]

El-Sayed has called attention to what he characterizes as an Islamophobic dimension of the GOP's attack strategy. When critics invoked his full name "Abdulrahman" in a pointed way, he responded: "They want to use my whole name against me. Mike, listen, man. If you can't say the name, it's Abdulrahman, keep the name out your damn mouth." The 9/11 attribution — connecting a Muslim-American candidate to the worst terrorist attack on American soil — sits inside this pattern of attacks. Whether that framing is a legitimate political vulnerability or a religiously coded smear is a question the race will not resolve cleanly.^[10]

Piker's role in the 2026 cycle extends beyond Michigan. He has campaigned for Francesca Hong in Wisconsin's governor's race and backed Melat Kiros in Colorado, who ousted a three-decade Democratic incumbent in that state's June primary. The El-Sayed association is the most high-profile of these partnerships and the most contested.^[3]

Synthesis Scorecard

Actor	Outcome	How
Mike Rogers	Mixed	Landed a vivid attack line that set a general-election tone; earned a "Pants on Fire" fact-check within two days. The misattribution may shift coverage from the association itself to his own credibility.
Abdul El-Sayed	Mixed	Cleared of the specific false attribution; has direct on-camera rebuttals in the record. But the Piker association and non-disavowal remain a live attack surface — one Rogers stated clumsily but could restate more accurately.
Hasan Piker	Mixed	His 2026 endorsements moved races in Colorado and Michigan; his 2019 remark is now a recurring campaign liability for candidates who accept his backing, including in a Senate general election with national attention.