Fact check: How Tim Scott and a Republican attack ad misleadingly snipped key context from El-Sayed’s ‘dangerous’ speech

By Daniel Dale, CNN

(CNN) — The leader of Senate Republicans’ campaign arm, Sen. Tim Scott, said in a Sunday interview on CNN that people should believe something Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed supposedly said about himself. But Scott took El-Sayed’s quote out of context. So did an attack ad released last week by the group Scott chairs.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee’s online ad has generated attention and criticism for using the full legal name of El-Sayed, a Muslim former public health official who is running in Michigan against Republican former congressman Mike Rogers. But the ad is also notable for how, like Scott, it uses a misleadingly snipped “dangerous” comment to bolster its case that El-Sayed is a radical.

How Scott and the NRSC ad portrayed El-Sayed’s words

In the CNN interview on Sunday, Scott claimed of El-Sayed: “He says he’s the most dangerous candidate you can find. He’s right. We should trust his words, not ours.” The 30-second ad features a one-second video clip of El-Sayed shouting, “I’m pretty damn dangerous” – immediately before turning to an attack on El-Sayed’s stance toward the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the early 2010s.

What El-Sayed actually said, in full

The full video of El-Sayed’s remarks, at a July 25 campaign event during the Democratic primary he won, shows he was arguing that he is an ally to struggling Americans and merely “dangerous” to a list of corporate and political interests he claimed are “rigging our policies against us.” The NRSC ad and Scott’s remark on CNN didn’t acknowledge that the “dangerous” identifier was directed at specific targets, nor that El-Sayed was rejecting the notion that he is broadly “dangerous” to Americans.

Here’s the full context.

El-Sayed said his critics “always use this word around me: dangerous,” then added sarcastically, to some audience laughter, “I always wonder, like, why would you call someone like me dangerous? It’s not like people who look like me have ever been called dangerous. It’s not like you’re falling into a well-worn groove that’s been around for 25 years calling people who look like me with names like mine dangerous. I know that’s not what you’re doing, right?”

He continued: “I’ll just say this. Go ask a child who needed a pair of glasses in Detroit if I’m dangerous. Go ask the folks who could not breathe because of smokestacks spewing out sulfur dioxide if I’m dangerous. Go ask the parents of kids who are going to schools that were leaded if I’m dangerous. Go ask the people flooded in medical debt if I’m dangerous. I think what they’ll tell you is: He’s the best friend you might have if you want government to work for you. I’ll tell you what: If you’re AIPAC, I’m pretty damn dangerous. If you’re Big Pharma, I’m dangerous. If you’re Big Tech and want to put a data center in your backyard, I’m dangerous. If you’re a big bank that wants to collude against us, I am dangerous. If you’re a monopolist who wants to raise our prices, I’m dangerous. If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m pretty damn dangerous. And I think it’s about damn time we had Democrats who are willing to be dangerous for all the people rigging our policies against us.”

Even the RNC previously provided significantly more context

In a social media post on the day of El-Sayed’s speech, the Republican National Committee posted a 15-second clip of El-Sayed saying: “If you’re a big bank that wants to collude against us, I am dangerous. If you’re a monopolist who wants to raise our prices, I’m dangerous. If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m pretty damn dangerous.”

That’s not El-Sayed’s entire monologue, of course, but it’s a fair edit – clearly demonstrating that El-Sayed was not generally admitting he’s a “dangerous” man but rather identifying himself as “dangerous” to big businesses supposedly hurting the public and to Schumer, the Democratic Senate leader the party’s left has long criticized.

The NRSC, meanwhile, posted a clip that day showing El-Sayed saying: “If you’re Chuck Schumer, I’m pretty damn dangerous.” Even that four-second clip was fairer than the one-second, zero-context version of the “dangerous” quote the NRSC used in the ad.

Asked by CNN this week whether the ad did not take El-Sayed’s “dangerous” comment significantly out of context, NRSC spokesperson Joanna Rodriguez said in an email, “As you mentioned, yes, Abdul El-Sayed did in fact say he was dangerous.” Rodriguez went on to list some El-Sayed remarks she argued were examples of dangerous campaign rhetoric from him and to repeat the attacks from the 30-second ad.

Republicans are entitled to argue that El-Sayed is dangerous and has said dangerous things. But Scott purported to be quoting El-Sayed’s own words, and he didn’t fairly convey those words. The ad didn’t either.

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