CNN Catches Senate Frontrunner Deleting ‘Defund’ Trail

When a leading Senate hopeful gets caught erasing his own “defund the police” record, it feeds the growing belief that America’s political class will say anything today to hide what they said yesterday.

Story Snapshot

Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed now insists he “never” backed defunding the police, but 2020 interviews show he said, “We do need to defund the police.”
CNN’s KFile review found deleted posts and past media hits where El-Sayed repeatedly endorsed the “defund” movement as a way to shift money from policing to social programs.
On CNN, El-Sayed dodged questions about why he erased those posts, blaming “clickbait” and claiming his words were taken out of context.
The clash highlights how politicians from both parties play word games with crime and policing, while many Americans feel less safe and less trusting of government.

El-Sayed’s Past “Defund the Police” Statements

In 2020, former Detroit public health director Abdul El-Sayed spoke clearly about defunding the police as protests swept the country after George Floyd’s death. In a Detroit Public Radio interview that June, he said, “I believe that we do need to defund the police,” and then explained what that meant to him. He described defunding as taking money away from locking people up or using deadly force, and instead spending it on schools, health, housing, and community programs. At the time, he urged activists to explain the idea beyond a hashtag so people would understand it as “refunding” public services.

CNN’s KFile team recently pulled his old media appearances and social posts, and they found he did not just repeat the slogan once. They reported that El-Sayed consistently backed the “defund” concept across interviews in 2020 and 2021, framing it as a shift of resources away from policing toward mental health and anti-poverty work. One now-deleted post from June 2020 argued that most major U.S. cities spend “way too much” on police and “way too little” on public schools, health departments, recreation, and housing, and said “fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about.” These records show a clear pattern of support for the movement, even while he tried to soften the word by talking about “refunding” communities.

The CNN Confrontation and Deleted Posts

Now running as the Democratic front-runner for the United States Senate seat in Michigan, El-Sayed faces a very different political climate. Crime concerns have risen, and “defund the police” polls poorly with many swing voters and older Americans on both the left and right. In recent interviews, including with CNN anchors Kasie Hunt and Manu Raju, El-Sayed has insisted he “never, never called for defunding” the police and claims he only wanted better policing and more social services. When CNN pressed him about deleted posts that praised the movement, he said they were taken “out of context” and dismissed them as “clickbait in D.C.” rather than a true picture of his beliefs.

Reporting from CNN and other outlets shows that El-Sayed quietly erased thousands of old social media posts during this Senate run, including a dozen tweets that supported the “defund the police” movement by name. When asked directly why he deleted them, he did not give a clear answer and instead tried to shift the focus back to his current platform of funding “good policing” along with behavioral health and public safety programs. Conservative media and some opponents seized on the footage of him being confronted on air, saying he was caught lying and squirming as CNN played his own words back to him. For many viewers, the issue is less about the policy itself and more about whether they can trust what politicians say when the political winds change.

Why “Defund” Keeps Fueling Distrust

The fight over El-Sayed’s record fits a larger pattern around the “defund the police” slogan that has confused and angered voters for years. Legal scholars and social scientists note the term has no single clear meaning; it can mean either cutting some funding and redirecting it, or completely dismantling police departments. Research shows public support drops sharply when people hear “defund” as getting rid of police, but support rises when it is framed as moving some money to mental health, housing, and youth programs. Activists and some liberals focus on the second meaning, while many conservatives, and some wary moderates, hear only the first.

This gap creates a fertile space for political games. Republican campaigns have run attack ads tying Democrats to extreme versions of “defund,” while some Democrats try to rewrite or blur their own past language when crime rises. At the same time, studies of city budgets find that, in most places, true deep cuts to police spending never happened; many departments now get more money than before 2020. For citizens who feel unsafe, over-taxed, and ignored by leaders, the El-Sayed episode looks like more of the same: leaders using hot slogans when they help their careers, then deleting and denying when those words become a liability, while core problems of crime, poverty, and trust in institutions remain unsolved.