Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed speaks onstage Sunday during a midterm campaign rally in Flint, Michigan. (Jeff Kowalsky – AFP / Getty Images)
By Joe Saunders October 20, 2026 at 3:41pm
Undercover activist James O’Keefe is at it again.
The covert camera mastermind, whose videos have been targeting progressive political operations going back to the first Obama administration, is putting his stamp on the Michigan Senate race with a video released Monday.
And Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign can’t be happy about it.
BREAKING NEWS: Abdul El-Sayed Campaign Official Reveals El-Sayed Receives Overseas Donations, Admits Foreign Contributions Are Illegal Under Federal Law, Warns Denouncing Hamas Could Cost Support “You know, he [Abdul El-Sayed] has people from overseas that donate to him…No it is not allowed.” “He [Abdul El Sayed] can’t just say, you know, no, I don’t support Hamas, you know, I reject all of them, because he’s going to lose the people that brought him up in the first place.” @AbdulElSayed @MikeRogersForMI
— O’Keefe Media Group (@OKeefeMedia) October 19, 2026
The video featured a Democratic operative identified as Abdoul Beckwith stating that El-Sayed gets funding from overseas donors and candidly admitting that “it’s not allowed.”
O’Keefe cited a section of federal law that explicitly prohibits a “foreign national” from donating “money or other thing of value” to any candidate in a federal, state, or local election in the U.S.
But according to an O’Keefe Media Group account, Beckwith said there are ways around that:
We went undercover inside Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign, capturing conversations with Abdoul Beckwith, a regional field organizer for Abdul for Senate, discussing El-Sayed’s overseas campaign contributions, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Beckwith…
— O’Keefe Media Group (@OKeefeMedia) October 19, 2026
In a part of the conversation that apparently took place off camera, according to a post OMG published, Beckwith described “a hypothetical arrangement in which overseas money passes through a family member.”
“Beckwith said, ‘And then people overseas give money to him. And then he gives money to you. It’s that type of thing,’” the OMG report said. “He added, ‘Everybody does it!’”
The video’s publication had a virtually instantaneous response, with the El-Sayed campaign issuing a statement to OMG denying any connection to Beckwith. It also called Beckwith’s comments “untrue, wildly misinformed and not reflective of the campaign.”
Official Statement from @AbdulElSayed’s Team https://t.co/mvqXPxnShN
— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) October 19, 2026
And the Michigan Democratic Party issued a statement announcing that Beckwith is no longer employed by it:
JUST IN: The Michigan Democratic Party has announced Abdoul Beckwith has been terminated from his position. @MichiganDems https://t.co/ahrJjueVNZ
— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) October 19, 2026
Beckwith clearly has some time in working for Democrats — as well as some previous experience with O’Keefe’s operations. He described to the individual who made the video working on the Georgia Senate runoff campaign in 2020 when it was targeted by Project Veritas, the undercover video operation O’Keefe founded and led until he was removed from the organization in 2023.
(Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won both runoff elections in 2021.)
Should political candidates denounce extremist groups like Hamas publicly?
The videos did not say where the purported overseas money was coming from, but Beckwith was recorded speaking at some length about why El-Sayed has been unable to denounce the terrorist group Hamas. It would, Beckwith said, “lose the people that brought him up in the first place.”
The implication, at least, of the collective statements — and others, where Beckwith bashes Jews and “white people” around El-Sayed — is that El-Sayed is receiving contributions from Hamas supporters, or at least sympathizers, which could mean donors from the Middle East or European countries where pro-Palestinian (and anti-Israel) feelings run high.
Near the end of the video, O’Keefe promised a new round of upcoming footage that he said showed the reaction at El-Sayed election headquarters in Detroit to an O’Keefe Media Group visit last week for comment on the Beckwith report.
“There was an assault against our news organization from Abdoul Beckwith, and we were placed in imminent harm,” O’Keefe said.
He said he’d filed a report with the Detroit police.
O’Keefe has been known as a kind of gadfly — a kind of gadfly that stings — for progressive organizations since 2009, when he and a young woman posing as a prostitute published a series of videos that ended up destroying the leftist organization known as ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now).
Since then, both with Project Veritas and independently, O’Keefe has produced undercover videos hitting leftist targets such as then-Democrat Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate campaign in 2018, Vermont socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2020, the disastrous “trans” influencer Dylan Mulvaney in 2023, and a gay Pentagon staffer caught on camera this year admitting he was subverting President Donald Trump’s policies in hope of reversing them completely when a Democrat is back in the Oval Office.
(There were many more, as well as some controversies.)
With only two weeks to go before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, the impact of O’Keefe’s latest effort on the Michigan Senate race remains to be seen, but it’s clear the El-Sayed campaign isn’t happy about it.
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Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
