Wayne County, Michigan, has told an independent journalist that a public records request for emails sent by U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the days following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel will not be processed until after the November election.
El-Sayed was serving as Wayne County’s health director at the time of the attack. The journalist, who covers antisemitism, said the interest stemmed partly from comments made by El-Sayed’s half-sister, Eman Abdelhadi, who posted on X that the Hamas attackers had “been held in an open prison for 16 years” and were “finally fighting their oppressors.” El-Sayed has said he disagrees with some of his sister’s views, prompting the journalist to seek his own emails from that period to see whether he addressed Oct. 7 directly.
On Sept. 18, a colleague of the journalist filed a request under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act seeking emails to or from El-Sayed between Oct. 5 and Nov. 1, 2023, containing keywords tied to Israel, Gaza, Hamas and the conflict. The county took a 10-business-day extension before responding on Oct. 14, stating that processing the request would take at least 75 days and cost $757.20. The county also automatically closed the original request.
The requesters then narrowed their ask, seeking only emails sent by El-Sayed — not emails to or from him — over a shorter nine-day window, Oct. 7 through Oct. 15, and offered to drop three of the search keywords. According to the journalist, a phone call to the county to discuss expediting the narrowed request led instead to an instruction to file an entirely new request. The county then took another 10-business-day extension and set a new response deadline of Nov. 6 — three days after the election.
The journalist argues the delay is unnecessary, since the county had already located records in response to the earlier, broader request and would only need to filter those results to the narrower nine-day period. Wayne County did not explain why that filtering could not be done more quickly. County lawyer Kathryn Levasseur-Cousin told the requesters the health department would respond to the new request within the time allowed under Michigan’s FOIA statute, and that they could alternatively pay to have the records from the first request reviewed.
Under either path, the records are unlikely to be released before voters cast their ballots.
El-Sayed has previously drawn scrutiny over his public remarks on antisemitic violence. After an Islamist terrorist drove a truck into a synagogue preschool and opened fire with an AR-15, El-Sayed said “hurt people hurt people,” a comment that was widely criticized at the time. His past anti-Israel statements have also led some Jewish voters in Michigan to express hesitation about supporting his Senate bid.
Wayne County has not indicated it will reconsider the timeline. The journalist who filed the request says the county could still release the emails before Election Day if it chose to.
