Thomas Teepell, a former aide to Josh Hawley, was identified as the man who heckled Abdul El-Sayed at a Michigan town hall on Saturday and demanded that he disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. The confrontation landed in the middle of a close Michigan Senate race and gave a public face to a line of attack that has followed El-Sayed for weeks.
Staff records show Teepell joined Hawley’s office as an intern in 2023 and rose to operations director before leaving in February. He later became political director for Philip Sarnecki’s Kansas gubernatorial campaign, and Sarnecki lost the Republican primary on 4 August. Teepell is also the son of Republican strategist Timmy Teepell, a longtime adviser to Hawley and former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal.
At the town hall, El-Sayed answered, “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” when asked whether he would disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. He said he was running for the Senate and happens to be Muslim, and that the question carried an implication of dual loyalty. Later, on Meet the Press, he said neither he nor his family had any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The pressure on him did not begin with Teepell. The conservative Washington Free Beacon resurfaced social media posts by Eman Abdelhadi about their mother’s activism in the group in the 1970s, but there is no evidence that El-Sayed was personally involved with the Muslim Brotherhood. He was born in the 1980s and was not raised by his birth mother. Still, Republicans and Donald Trump have kept pressing the claim, with Trump calling El-Sayed “100%” Muslim Brotherhood at a White House lunch, labeling him a “fraud” and a “member,” and then saying, “So I was right. He’s a jihadist.”
The dispute matters because it is playing out as the race tightens. El-Sayed held a narrow lead in the RealClearPolitics average, 48.1% to 45.5% for Rogers, and an InsiderAdvantage survey taken on 9-10 October had him ahead 48% to 46%. That leaves Republicans with a simple question and no public evidence behind it: what exactly are they saying ties El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, beyond repetition?
