Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers sent a fundraising email telling supporters he saw Osama bin Laden's dead body "with my own eyes." He did not. He was in Washington DC, he got a phone call, and he looked at a photograph. That's the whole story, and somehow it gets worse from there.
The Exact Words Matter Here
Rogers wrote, in bold, in a fundraising email: "I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America." According to The Guardian, which obtained a screenshot of the email shared by journalist Azi Paybarah, that sentence was nestled inside a broader passage about swearing sacred oaths, hunting terrorists, and standing on the frontlines of national security.
Every word in that sentence was chosen deliberately. "With my own eyes" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence. It's the whole point of the sentence. It's meant to conjure a specific image: Mike Rogers, in the room, having looked upon the fallen body of the world's most wanted terrorist. That image is false.
What Rogers actually did, as he himself told reporters the day after the May 1, 2011 raid and recounts in his own campaign video, was receive a phone call at his home in Washington DC from then-CIA Director Leon Panetta. He was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee. He was informed. He was not there.
The Photo Defense Is Not the Slam Dunk They Think It Is
Rogers' campaign did not respond to The Guardian's requests for comment. The working theory, floated by Paybarah, is that Rogers was referring to the fact that he was among a small group of officials who were shown a photograph of bin Laden's body after the raid.
This is the defense. The defense is that "I saw the dead body with my own eyes" actually means "I saw a photograph of the dead body." In no court of law, no English class, and no reasonable conversation does that sentence mean photograph. A photograph is not a body. Seeing a photograph is not seeing something with your own eyes in the sense that phrase has meant in every human language since the invention of eyes.
For what it's worth, Rogers himself at the time said the photograph was convincing enough that he was certain bin Laden was dead. He also argued, correctly, that the photos shouldn't be released publicly. "Conspiracy theorists around the world will just claim the photos are doctored anyway," Rogers said in a 2011 statement. So he understood the distinction between a photograph and physical reality. He just apparently forgot it when writing fundraising copy.
The Pattern Is the Point
This is not a one-time slip. The Guardian reports that in the years since the bin Laden raid, Rogers has repeatedly described his congressional role in intelligence oversight in vague terms that consistently seemed to inflate his actual involvement. The fundraising email is the most egregious example, but it fits a clear pattern.
Since Abdul El-Sayed, a Muslim doctor and former public health official, won the Democratic nomination, Rogers has leaned hard into his counterterrorism record. The night El-Sayed clinched the nomination, Rogers announced: "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."
That second sentence is a lie. A New York Times factcheck found it was not El-Sayed, but Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, a supporter of El-Sayed's, who once made that statement, retracted it, and apologized for it seven years before he endorsed El-Sayed. El-Sayed himself has condemned the 9/11 attacks clearly and repeatedly. In a 2021 essay, he wrote that he "watched terrorists with names like mine attack my country in the name of my faith" and that the attacks "devastated" him. Rogers simply does not care.
What Is Actually Happening in This Race
Mike Rogers is a former congressman running in a competitive Michigan Senate race against a Muslim candidate. He is repeatedly invoking, and apparently embellishing, his record on Islamic terrorism. He falsely accused El-Sayed of believing America deserved 9/11. He wrote fundraising copy implying he was physically present at or near the bin Laden raid. None of this is subtle.
This is a specific strategy. It is designed to make voters associate El-Sayed, a doctor who has spent his career in public health and has condemned the 9/11 attacks, with the people who carried out the 9/11 attacks. It uses the specter of terrorism the way a magician uses a curtain: to direct your attention somewhere while the real trick happens somewhere else.
The real trick is that Rogers is running on a record he's actively fabricating in real time, and betting that enough voters will never look closely enough to notice the gap between "I saw the dead body with my own eyes" and "I was home in DC when Leon Panetta called."
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that a man who wrote "I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes" in a fundraising email simply meant that he glanced at a photograph once. That is what his campaign would like you to accept. That is the explanation being offered, without a straight face, for a sentence that has exactly one plain meaning in the English language.
This is not a misstatement or a clumsy turn of phrase. Rogers is a former Army officer, a former FBI agent, and a former chair of the House Intelligence Committee. He knows the difference between seeing something with your own eyes and seeing a photograph of something. More to the point, he knows what donors picture when they read that sentence, and he wrote it anyway. He wrote it in bold.
The bin Laden lie is actually the smaller crime here. The bigger one is the sustained campaign to brand a Muslim American doctor, who has explicitly and publicly mourned 9/11 for over two decades, as someone sympathetic to the people who carried it out. Rogers has now been caught fabricating his terrorism-fighting credentials and fabricating his opponent's positions. If Michigan voters hand this man a Senate seat, they will know exactly what they bought.
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