Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers has boasted that he saw Osama bin Laden’s dead body with his own eyes—despite the Republican being in Congress at the time of his killing.
Rogers, 63, made the bizarre brag in a fundraising email, going so far as to bold the text that said he personally saw bin Laden’s body after SEAL Team Six killed him in a targeted raid in Pakistan.
“When I served as a U.S. Army officer and an FBI special agent, I swore a sacred oath to defend the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” Rogers wrote, according to a screenshot of the August email shared by Straight Arrow News. “I dedicated my life to keeping our families safe – working in the shadows, hunting down terrorists, and standing on the frontlines of our national security.”
He continued, “I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America.”
Rogers was not in Pakistan when bin Laden was killed in 2011, nor was he in the military. He said himself that he was in Washington, where he was serving his sixth term representing Michigan’s 8th congressional district and chairing the House Intelligence Committee.
Rogers said at the time that he learned of bin Laden’s killing in a phone call from Barack Obama’s CIA director, Leon Panetta.
A Roll Call report from 2011 said Rogers was one of the lawmakers who viewed photos of bin Laden’s body after the raid. He told CNN the photos were “pretty gruesome,” which is perhaps what his curiously worded fundraising email was referring to.
The Guardian reports that Rogers has frequently described his role on the intel committee as key to providing funds for U.S. intelligence agencies that contributed to bin Laden’s death. The paper writes that he “seemed to exaggerate his role.”
Rogers’ campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Recent polls show Rogers as being neck and neck with Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor and former public health official. A 270 TO WIN average of the five most recent major polls, including one conducted by Fox News, puts El-Sayed about two percentage points ahead of Rogers.
Rogers has desperately tried to paint El-Sayed, who is Muslim, as being sympathetic to terrorists like those who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.
“Abdul doesn’t represent a vision for the future. He’s leading a movement grounded in ideological fanaticism,” he said after El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination this month.
Rogers continued, “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 incendiary statement is not true, as a fact-check by The New York Times quickly pointed out. El-Sayed, 41, has condemned the attacks for years. He even wrote a column for The Incision newsletter in 2021 in which he recalled the horror he felt on Sept. 11, 2001.
“I watched terrorists with names like mine attack my country in the name of my faith,” he wrote. “Three thousand of my fellow Americans were killed in the craven terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. The attack devastated me.”
