An Egyptian-American activist sentenced to life in prison by a Cairo court in 2015 for his role supporting the Muslim Brotherhood is now routing money into the U.S. Senate campaign of Michigan Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. Mohamed Soltan, president of the Washington-based American Committee for Middle East Rights (ACMER), gave the maximum personal contribution to El-Sayed’s campaign last April, while the 501(c)(4) he leads sent $25,000 to the super PAC backing him — confirmed by Federal Election Commission filings.
Soltan is the son of Salah Soltan, a senior Brotherhood figure who served as deputy minister of endowments under Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. The donations arrive as El-Sayed heads into the November general election against former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers — and as the Muslim Brotherhood’s own official publication has already celebrated his primary victory in an article headlined “Abdul Rahman al-Sayyid conquers the Zionists and runs for the Senate.”
The Money Trail
FEC records show two $3,500 contributions from Mohamed Soltan of Fairfax, Virginia to Abdul for U.S. Senate on April 15, 2025 — a combined $7,000, the maximum an individual may give to a federal candidate across the primary and general elections. On June 12, 2026, ACMER itself sent $25,000 to Fighting for Michigan PAC, the super PAC backing El-Sayed. ACMER Treasurer Muna Jondy of Flushing, Michigan added a $15,000 contribution to the same super PAC on June 7, 2026, according to FEC filings.
The pattern extends into El-Sayed’s principal campaign committee. Jondy personally maxed out her contributions to Abdul for U.S. Senate with three transactions totaling $7,000 on June 24, 2025. Four additional Jondy family members from the same Flushing address gave another $17,500 across a dozen transactions between June 2025 and February 2026, FEC records show. ACMER’s most recent Form 990, filed in November 2025 with ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, lists Soltan as president and Jondy as treasurer, and reports net assets of $766,995.
The Cairo Sentence
Mohamed Soltan was arrested in August 2013 amid the crackdown that followed Morsi’s ouster and, in April 2015, was sentenced — alongside 35 others in a mass trial — to life in prison on charges including funding and membership in the Muslim Brotherhood. Amnesty International denounced the proceedings as unjust; the court’s judgment nonetheless remains on the record. Soltan was released in May 2015 after a 16-month hunger strike and pressure from the Obama administration, and now works in Washington as a policy advocate and investment consultant.
His father, Salah Soltan, was sentenced separately to death and to life in prison for inciting violence during the 2013 unrest, identified as one of more than 50 senior Brotherhood figures Egyptian prosecutors said set up a “control room” to direct the response to the military intervention.
El-Sayed’s Own Potential Brotherhood Record
The donations track a documented history. In January 2011, El-Sayed — then writing as “Abdulrahman El-Sayed,” an assistant professor at Columbia — published a Huffington Post column arguing Americans should back the uprising against Hosni Mubarak. “Even if the Muslim Brotherhood were to take power,” he wrote, “there are several reasons why the ensuing state would look nothing like Iran.”
In November 2012, after Morsi issued a decree ending judicial review of his decisions and dismissing Egypt’s attorney general, El-Sayed appeared, according to reporting by The Midwesterner citing a translation of the Arabic original, as one of 46 signatories to a statement in state-affiliated Bawabat Al-Ahram endorsing Morsi’s “revolutionary decisions” and calling on him to “purge the media and the police.”
A Broader Network
Soltan is not the only donor of concern. El-Sayed’s father-in-law Tayeb Jukaku, a founding-committee member of the Islamic Society of North America and former president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ Michigan chapter, has contributed $200,000 to Fighting for Michigan PAC. Both ISNA and CAIR were named unindicted co-conspirators in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation Hamas-financing prosecution, the largest terrorism-financing case in U.S. history.
A Fox News Digital review found El-Sayed’s campaign has collected over $115,000 from at least 41 individuals affiliated with CAIR, including its national board chair, treasurer, and vice chair.
On leaked audio from a March campaign strategy call obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, El-Sayed instructed staff not to comment on Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s death following U.S. military strikes. “There are a lot of people in Dearborn who are sad today,” he said. “I just don’t want to comment on Khamenei at all.” El-Sayed’s campaign did not dispute the recording’s content but questioned how it was obtained.
The Bigger Picture
El-Sayed has built his campaign on the slogan of getting “money out of politics” and has singled out pro-Israel spending for particular criticism. The FEC filings tell a different story: a documented pipeline running from a man Egypt sentenced to life for financing the Brotherhood, through a Washington nonprofit, into the account of a candidate the Brotherhood’s own press already counts as a victory.