The donations from Tayeb Jukaku cement him as the PAC’s largest individual backer and come as El-Sayed rails against super PAC spending
Abdul El-Sayed’s father-in-law gave another $100,000 to a super PAC backing the left-wing Michigan Senate candidate, bringing his total contributions to $300,000 and cementing him as the group’s largest individual donor.
Tayeb Jukaku made the six-figure donation to Fighting for Michigan PAC on June 22, federal campaign finance records show, adding to his two contributions of $100,000 each made on February 3 and March 31. That makes Jukaku the group’s top individual donor: Only the anti-Israel activist group Institute for Middle East Understanding—a George Soros-funded nonprofit whose communications director is the former Palestine Liberation Organization legal adviser Diana Buttu—has contributed as much as Jukaku, giving $300,000 on June 29.
The money from Jukaku has helped Fighting for Michigan PAC launch a “multimillion-dollar independent expenditure campaign” backing El-Sayed, as the group announced in June. The spending comes as El-Sayed campaigns on pushing “money out of politics,” a slogan he has featured on his campaign’s yard signs. He has particularly denounced spending from pro-Israel groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, accusing it of working to “buy off government” to “make sure that our money is sent abroad to kill other people.”
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. Fighting for Michigan PAC said Jukaku “has no role with the PAC” but did not address his donations.
Jukaku, who was born in India and attended medical school there before undergoing his medical training in the United States in the mid-1980s, owns a kidney treatment practice. He serves on the Islamic Society of North America Founders Committee and on the board of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’s Michigan chapter, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Federal prosecutors named both groups as unindicted co-conspirators in the landmark terrorist financing case USA v. Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.
Jukaku’s status as Fighting for Michigan PAC’s top donor has drawn criticism from El-Sayed’s primary opponent, congresswoman Haley Stevens, who said during a primary debate earlier this month that El-Sayed is “great at covering up that his father-in-law is running his super PAC that’s spending millions of dollars for him.”
“Abdul, you talk about getting money out of politics and putting money in people’s pockets,” she said. “But who is putting money in yours? What are you hiding?”
Days after the debate, El-Sayed vowed to release his 2025 tax return, which he described as “pretty standard.” He released two pages of the return on Wednesday, which showed $686,069 in total income, including $292,000 in “additional income” and $262,000 in capital gains. It’s unclear exactly where that money came from because El-Sayed, who has emphasized the need for “government transparency,” omitted the remainder of the return that would have provided more detail. Though El-Sayed is running as a champion of the working class and opponent of the wealthy, his 2025 income places him in the top 1 percent of Michigan earners.
Other notable donors to Fighting for Michigan PAC include fast-food magnate Zubair Kazi, who donated $50,000 to the PAC through an offshore company based in the Virgin Islands, a popular corporate tax haven. El-Sayed has campaigned on an economic platform to “stop big corporations from hiding their assets to evade taxes by cracking down on the shady practices that let corporations get away with this.”
Washington Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal’s Medicare for All PAC also gave $250,000. El-Sayed has campaigned on a single-payer Medicare for All system, but his wife, psychiatrist Sarah Jukaku, doesn’t accept Medicare, Medicaid, or any other insurance plan in her own private medical practice, the Free Beacon reported. El-Sayed has said that doctors who don’t accept Medicaid think of low-income patients as “half citizen[s].”
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