Just when Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed wanted to avoid any more public ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an undercover video shows a campaign official saying that the U.S.-designated terrorist organization is not all that bad. “I don’t have any issue with the Muslim Brotherhood,” said T.J. Wolfgram, independent and conservative outreach captain for El-Sayed’s campaign, in an October 15 video obtained by The Midwesterner. “And if I knew more about it, I might support some of what they do.”

Notably, Wolfgram is not just any staffer on El-Sayed’s campaign. He is a leader of the operation to make the campaign appeal to independents and conservatives. Yet even he saw no “issue with the Muslim Brotherhood” and thought he would probably support them if he knew more.

Wolfgram displayed at least some familiarity with the Muslim Brotherhood’s practices. “I mean, granted, there’s going to be cultural differences,” he deflected. “We must understand that self-determination includes judgement calls that we don’t agree with. They may choose to treat women in ways that we don’t agree with.”

In 2013, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood issued a statement critiquing a proposed U.N. declaration on women’s rights, saying that the draft articles “contradict established principles of Islam, undermine Islamic ethics and destroy the family.” Among other objections, the Muslim Brotherhood feared the U.N. statement would give wives full rights to file legal complaints against husbands, allow Muslim women to marry non-Muslim men, outlaw polygamy, and cancel the Muslim requirement for a husband’s consent to his wife travelling, working, spending money, or using contraception.

Wolfgram simply waved this away. “The Muslim Brotherhood was the revolution in Egypt that we were — we as the United States — were either neutral on or even supportive of at the time.”

In social media posts from 2012, El-Sayed’s half-sister Eman Abdelhadi said that her family in Egypt “has long been MB” and “supports the #MB in Egypt.” Despite this, the senate candidate has felt the need to repeatedly insist that he has “no ties” to the movement.

“It’s so ridiculous,” Wolfgram complained, frustrated that voters are paying any heed to scrutiny of El-Sayed’s family members who have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. “Now it’s like, ‘Oh in 1999, Abdul’s mom’ — who did not raise him because he grew up with his father and stepmom — ‘she worked for a company that transferred $60,000 to the Muslim Brotherhood,’” he vented. “It’s because Americans are idiots.”

In January of this year, the U.S. State and Treasury Departments designated branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations because “they explicitly and enthusiastically support terrorist groups like Hamas.”

In response, El-Sayed has worked hard to distance himself from the group on the campaign trail. When El-Sayed’s Republican opponent Mike Rogers brought the issue up in their final televised debate, El-Sayed fired back, “It’s really quite beneath you to call into question my loyalty to the Constitution.” The week before, a reporter with NBC News asked El-Sayed about the connection, prompting the candidate to insist, “I have no ties, we have no ties.”

In 2012, El-Sayed himself signed a letter from 46 “leaders of the Egyptian community” in the U.S., which supported the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned regime in Egypt and urged it to “purge the media and the police as quickly as possible.”

Following the release of The Midwesterner’s footage, The Daily Wire obtained additional footage from the same conversation. In that additional footage, Wolfgram admitted that El-Sayed’s Medicare for All proposal would “certainly” require a tax increase.

In that context, Wolfgram argued, “Realistically, like, exactly what he says right now is not nearly as important as what he does when he’s in the seat.” That remark applies as much to El-Sayed’s Muslim Brotherhood comments as his health care policy.

As FRC Action’s Matt Carpenter warned in the “Outstanding” podcast, “The thing with El-Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood, he just keeps insisting on the lie that his family is not connected. [But there are] letters that he wrote on behalf of Muslim Brotherhood. He keeps insisting, ‘That’s just a fake issue that Mike Rogers has brought up.’ It’s not a fake issue. It’s a real issue. Because if he’s lying about that, what else is he lying about?”