Call it pay for pray.
Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed will appear at a “clergy round table” this week with a black Detroit pastor to whom the El-Sayed campaign has quietly paid $82,500 for “strategic consulting,” part of a gambit to help the far-left Democrat shore up his anemic support from black voters.
Horace Sheffield, the pastor of New Destiny Christian Fellowship and father of Detroit’s mayor, will host the event with El-Sayed at his church on Wednesday. The Ecumenical Ministers Alliance, Sheffield’s nonprofit, is listed as an organizer of the event.
It comes as El-Sayed and Sheffiield have faced allegations of political “pay-for-play” over their lucrative but undisclosed financial relationship. El-Sayed has touted the endorsement of Sheffield, whom he calls a “Detroit political powerhouse and community advocate,” on the campaign trail and his campaign website, but without mentioning that his campaign pays $7,500 per month to the Ecumenical Ministers Alliance for “consulting,” the Washington Free Beacon reported. The campaign has paid the Ecumenical Ministers Alliance a total of $82,500 since October 21, according to campaign finance disclosures.
Sheffield—who has praised antisemitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan for preaching “the truth”—endorsed El-Sayed weeks after those initial payments, in a November 8 interview with El-Sayed on his weekend talk radio show, The Wake-Up Call. Sheffield did not disclose that he was in El-Sayed’s payroll in the interview, nor did he disclose the payments during two other fawning interviews he conducted with the candidate on July 25 and August 1.
“Lord, help this man win,” Sheffield said in the July 25 interview. El-Sayed quipped in the August 1 interview to Sheffield and his cohosts that “you all treat me a lot better than CNN.”
Sheffield has also published social media posts in which he attacked El-Sayed’s then-primary opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, over support she received from AIPAC and “other Jewish organizations.” Sheffield hosted El-Sayed at his church for an event in December and organized a get-out-the-vote event for the campaign on August 1.
The scheme has stoked comparisons to Al Sharpton, who interviewed Kamala Harris on his MSNBC show after the Harris campaign paid $500,000 to Sharpton’s nonprofit, the National Action Network. Sheffield is the head of the National Action Network’s Detroit chapter.
El-Sayed has struggled to woo black voters, many of whom are more socially conservative than the candidate, a close ally of the socialist wing of the Democratic Party who supports sex-change surgeries for minors and allowing of biological males in women’s sports. In addition to his alliance with Sheffield and other black church leaders, El-Sayed has cozied up to members of the Nation of Islam, an antisemitic group that nonetheless has considerable influence among Detroit’s black community. He has also supported reparations to black Americans for slavery and for redlining, by which financial institutions refused to do business in black neighborhoods.
“We need reparations in this country,” he said in May.
Sheffield, whose daughter Mary Sheffield was elected Detroit mayor last year, oversees an interlocking network of nonprofit organizations centered around both historically black churches and businesses in Detroit. In addition to the Ecumenical Ministers Alliance, Sheffield leads the Detroit Association of Black Organizations and is closely affiliated with 5Plus1, a political dark money group.
In addition to the handsome consulting fees, other funds linked indirectly to El-Sayed are flowing Sheffield’s way,
Fighting for Michigan PAC, a Super PAC partially funded by El-Sayed’s wealthy father-in-law that is also the largest outside group supporting his campaign, contributed $19,285 last month to 5Plus1, according to campaign disclosures. 5Plus1 has aired a series of pro-El-Sayed ads on local radio stations, according to FCC filings. While Sheffield has tried to distance himself in the past from 5Plus1, the group’s previous FCC filings list Sheffield’s email address and phone number on radio ad disclosure documents.
El-Sayed’s payments to Sheffield’s operation has raised questions about the registration status of the Ecumenical Ministers Alliance. Sheffield registered the nonprofit in 2010, but that lapsed in 2014. Sheffield told the Detroit News this month that he did not know why his charity’s registration had lapsed.
“I don’t handle that information,” Sheffield told the newspaper. “I will have them look. It’s probably just a matter of them reinstating it.”
El-Sayed, asked by the News about hiring Sheffield, said that “we work through a number of consultants all over the state to get the vote out, etc.”
El-Sayed’s campaign has not responded to the Free Beacon‘s requests for comment.
Sheffield’s political endorsements have stirred controversy before. In 2018, Sheffield was suspended from his talk radio show after revelations that Rep. Shri Thanedar (D., Mich.), a candidate for governor at the time, paid tens of thousands of dollars to the Ecumenical Ministers Alliance. Sheffield interviewed Thanedar, who ran in that election against El-Sayed and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D.), on his radio show but failed to disclose the payments.
(Like El-Sayed, Thanedar struggled with black voters. Unlike El-Sayed, he lost his primary this summer after the black community united behind one candidate.)
Sheffield’s radio station suspended his show at the time and filled airtime with polka music in its place. His current show airs on a radio station owned by Salem Media. The company disavowed Sheffield’s endorsements for El-Sayed, saying his statements “do not reflect the views of our company.”
Reached by phone earlier this month, Sheffield told a Free Beacon reporter he was “barking up the wrong tree” when asked about the payments from El-Sayed’s campaign, though he did not expand on the idiom.
Sheffield did not answer specific questions this week about the payments, the clergy roundtable, or the Ecumenical Ministers Alliance.
“Closed to the press,” he responded in a text message on Tuesday.
El-Sayed is scheduled to headline a convention over Labor Day weekend for the Islamic Society of North America, where he will share a stage with a cleric who has called the Holocaust a “hoax.”
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