Between 1999 and 2004, a woman named Fatten Fathy Elkomy worked for the Islamic American Relief Agency — processing wire transfers, appearing on recorded phone calls, and showing up in at least 14 court exhibits tied to a federal terror-financing case. She is the mother of Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for an open U.S. Senate seat in Michigan.
The U.S. Treasury Department designated IARA in 2004 for having "provided direct financial support" to Osama bin Laden. The same organization funded Hamas and the Taliban. And the man hoping to represent Michigan in the Senate grew up in that household.
In March 2007, the Justice Department hit IARA-USA with a 33-count indictment. A superseding indictment followed in January 2008. By 2010, two IARA board members had pleaded guilty. The government's case file included 945 exhibits — phone calls, faxes, wire transfers, tax forms, emails, and bank statements.
Elkomy's name appears in 14 of those exhibits. She's documented on eight wire transfers and five recorded calls between 1999 and 2002. One IARA-USA transfer-request form bearing her involvement moved $24,607.34 to the organization's Iraq office. Convicted IARA officials ultimately moved more than $1 million to Iraq in violation of sanctions.
To be clear, Elkomy was never charged with a crime. She was never named as a co-conspirator. But the organization she worked for — during the years she worked for it — was funneling money to the people who attacked us on September 11th. That's not guilt by association. That's a background check.
El-Sayed's broader circle raises its own questions. His father-in-law, Tayeb Jukaku, has his own connections worth examining. And the organizations that have backed El-Sayed's political rise — including the Islamic Society of North America and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, both unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation prosecution — form a pattern that a competent press corps would have explored years ago.
The media had every opportunity to vet this. El-Sayed has been a prominent political figure in Michigan for years. He ran for governor. He's been on cable news. He's now running for the Senate seat being vacated in one of the most closely watched races in the country, squaring off against Republican Mike Rogers, a former intelligence analyst. The court records were public. The Treasury designation was public. Elkomy's employment was documented in federal exhibits.
Nobody looked.
That's the part that should bother people more than the connection itself. We have a system that supposedly vets candidates for the highest offices in the country. Investigative journalists, opposition researchers, party leadership — all of them had access to these public records. The 945 exhibits weren't classified. The 33-count indictment wasn't sealed. The Treasury designation naming IARA a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist" entity wasn't hidden in a vault somewhere.
It was sitting in a federal courthouse, waiting for someone to care enough to read it.
El-Sayed will likely call this a smear. His supporters will say his mother's employer doesn't define him. And if this were a Republican candidate whose mother had spent five years processing wire transfers for an organization the Treasury Department accused of bankrolling the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, we all know exactly how much restraint the Washington Post would show.
The media's silence was a choice.
