In a recent fundraising email, the Republican candidate for Michigan’s open US Senate seat, former congressman Mike Rogers, appeared to mislead supporters about his past by suggesting that he had played an active role in the killing of Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaida who was shot and killed in an American military raid on his compound in Pakistan in 2011.
“When I served as a US army officer and an FBI special agent, I swore a sacred oath to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Rogers wrote, according to a screenshot of the email shared online by Azi Paybarah, a former Washington Post reporter now with Straight Arrow News. “I dedicated my life to keeping our families safe – working in the shadows, hunting down terrorists, and standing on the frontlines of our national security.”
He then added, in a section of the email highlighted in bold type: “I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America.”
Rogers, however, was not in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on 1 May 2011, when Bin Laden was shot and killed – nor was he in the White House Situation Room, where then president Barack Obama and senior administration officials at the time, including Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, followed the raid in real time.
Instead, as Rogers told reporters the next day, and recounts in a campaign video, he was at home in Washington DC – where, as the chair of the House intelligence committee at the time, he was informed about the raid in a phone call from Obama’s CIA director, Leon Panetta.
While the Rogers campaign did not respond to requests to explain what the former congressman meant by his claim, Paybarah, who first reported the fundraising email sent by Rogers on Sunday, suggested that Rogers must have been referring to the fact that he was one of a select few US officials to have seen a photograph of Bin Laden’s dead body.
Rogers said – days after the raid – that the photograph he’d seen made it clear that Bin Laden was dead. But he said he supported Obama’s decision to not make the graphic images of the raid public.
“The risks of release outweigh the benefits,” Rogers said in a statement at the time. “Conspiracy theorists around the world will just claim the photos are doctored anyway, and there is a real risk that releasing the photos will only serve to inflame public opinion in the Middle East.”
In the years since, though, Rogers has frequently referred to his role as a congressman who helped provide funds for US intelligence agencies in vague terms that seemed to exaggerate his role.
Since Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim doctor and former public health official, became his opponent in the Senate race, Rogers has repeatedly cited his own role in the US war on Islamist terrorism in his campaign statements.
“Abdul doesn’t represent a vision for the future. He’s leading a movement grounded in ideological fanaticism,” Rogers said the night that El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination. “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.”
A New York Times factcheck pointed out that the second part of Rogers’ “incendiary statement” was false: it was not El-Sayed, but one of his supporters, the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who once said that American deserved 9/11, before retracting and apologizing for that statement seven years before he endorsed El-Sayed.
For his part, El-Sayed has clearly denounced the 9/11 attacks for years. In a recollection of that day written in 2021, El-Sayed wrote:
“I watched terrorists with names like mine attack my country in the name of my faith. Three thousand of my fellow Americans were killed in the craven terrorist attacks in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania. The attack devastated me.”
