Michigan Senate candidate Rogers implied he saw Bin Laden's body — he wasn't there
Republican Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers suggested in a fundraising email that he witnessed Osama bin Laden's dead body, but he was actually at home in Washington DC when the 2011 raid took place.
Former congressman Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate for Michigan's open US Senate seat, sent a fundraising email that appeared to suggest he played a direct role in the 2011 killing of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden during a US military raid in Pakistan.
According to a screenshot shared online by former Washington Post reporter Azi Paybarah, Rogers wrote that as a former US Army officer and FBI special agent, he swore an oath to defend the country and spent years "working in the shadows, hunting down terrorists." In bold text, he added: "I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America."
In reality, Rogers was not in Abbottabad, Pakistan, when Bin Laden was killed on 1 May 2011, nor was he in the White House Situation Room with President Obama and other officials who watched the raid unfold. As Rogers himself told reporters the next day and later recounted in a campaign video, he was at home in Washington DC at the time, serving as chair of the House intelligence committee, when he received a phone call from CIA director Leon Panetta informing him of the raid.
The Rogers campaign did not respond to requests for clarification. Paybarah suggested Rogers may have been referring to having been among a small group of officials shown a photograph of Bin Laden's body afterward. Days after the raid, Rogers said the photo confirmed Bin Laden's death but said he supported Obama's decision not to release it publicly, citing risks of inflaming opinion in the Middle East.
Rogers has previously described his counterterrorism role in vague terms that appeared to overstate his involvement. Since Muslim doctor and former public health official Abdul El-Sayed became his Democratic opponent, Rogers has repeatedly invoked his anti-terrorism record, including a false claim that El-Sayed believed America deserved the 9/11 attacks. That statement was actually made years earlier by one of El-Sayed's supporters, who later apologized. El-Sayed himself has publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks.
