A Democrat running for United States Senate in Michigan told staffers he wanted to stay silent on the U.S. killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, because “there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad” about his death, according to leaked audio.

The Washington Free Beacon obtained the audio from a private campaign strategy call on March 1 as candidate Abdul El-Sayed makes it very clear he did not wish to take any public position on the Feb. 28 assassination at all.

“I also want to remind you guys that there are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today,” El-Sayed told his team. “So, like, I just don’t want to comment on Khamenei at all. Like, I don’t think it’s worth even touching that.”

“We have the moral high ground here,” he said, noting reporters would “try and bait us into saying, ‘Yeah, but isn’t it justified now that they took [Khamenei] out, right? And I just think, for us, we’ve got to be, like, ‘no.'”

Exclusive Audio: Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed said he avoided criticism of Khamenei due to Dearborn voter sensitivities:https://t.co/zv6rP735uB

— Alana Goodman (@alanagoodman) March 30, 2026

The Free Beacon explained that if news reporters pressed El-Sayed to take a position, he indicated he would change the subject to Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

“I’m just gonna go straight to pedophilia, frankly,” the Democrat said. “I’ll just be like, ‘Pedophile president decides that he doesn’t like the front page news, so he decides to take us into another war.'”

Bill Melugin of Fox News noted: “Yikes. They’ve got the audio too. Wild that this call with his staffers leaked like this.”

Josh Kraushaar, editor in chief of Jewish Insider, said the audio “speaks volumes about the level of extremism within the El-Sayed coalition here.”

When the Free Beacon requested comment, the news agency says it received a note from the campaign’s lawyers at the Sandler Reiff law firm in Washington, D.C.

“I write to inform you that the audio recording that you base the below questions on was obtained without the campaign’s permission, and without knowledge that individuals were being recorded,” wrote David Mitrani, a partner at the firm.

“The campaign is considering its legal options against the individual in question. Given these circumstances, the campaign expects that you will take this into account in determining whether to proceed with any reporting on this matter.”