Osama bin Laden was killed on May 1, 2011, by American special operators who raided his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small number of people were physically present. A slightly larger group followed it in real time from the White House Situation Room — President Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and a handful of senior officials.

Mike Rogers (MI) was in neither place. He was at his home in Washington, D.C., where — as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — he got a phone call about the raid from CIA Director Leon Panetta. He told reporters as much the next day, and he tells the same story in a campaign video.

Fifteen years later, he is running for Michigan's open U.S. Senate seat, and he sent supporters a fundraising email that says something different.

What the email said

The email walks through his biography — Army officer, FBI special agent, "working in the shadows, hunting down terrorists, and standing on the frontlines of our national security." Then comes a line the email puts in bold:

"I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America."

The email was first reported by Azi Paybarah, a former Washington Post reporter now at Straight Arrow News, who posted a screenshot of it. The Rogers campaign did not respond to requests to explain what he meant.

There is a plain explanation, and Rogers has known it since 2011. He was one of a small number of U.S. officials shown a photograph of bin Laden's body.

He knows the difference, because he argued about it in public

This is not a case of a candidate misremembering a blurry moment from a long time ago. In the days after the raid, Rogers was one of the loudest voices in Congress arguing that the government should not release the images — and the whole reason his opinion carried weight was that he had seen one.

Speaking as Intelligence Committee chairman on May 4, 2011, he told CBS News that releasing the photos would be a mistake:

"To treat Osama bin Laden like he's some trophy of the United States for public gloating I think is wrong."

He added that it would make it harder for "an average soldier, a sergeant in the Army in Ghazni province in Afghanistan" to win cooperation from villagers, and that "there's no gain by doing it. The conspiracy theorists aren't going to believe the photos ... they're going to be doubting Thomases forever."

In a statement at the time he made the same case: the risks of release outweighed the benefits, conspiracy theorists would say the photos were doctored anyway, and publishing them risked inflaming opinion in the Middle East.

Photos. Images. Doctored. That was his own vocabulary, in public, on the record, in the same week. The man writing fundraising emails in 2026 about seeing a body "with my own eyes" is the same man who in 2011 spent that week talking to reporters about a picture.

A pattern, not a slip

Rogers has built this Senate campaign on his national security résumé, and he has stretched it before — repeatedly describing his work funding intelligence agencies as a congressman in terms that made his role sound larger than it was.

He has leaned on it hardest since Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor and former public health official, won the Democratic nomination. On the night El-Sayed won, Rogers said: "I spent years hunting terrorists and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice. Never in a million years did I think that I would be running against someone who believes America deserved 9/11."

The second half of that sentence was false, and PolitiFact rated it Pants on Fire. El-Sayed never said it. A New York Times factcheck traced the line to a Twitch streamer who endorsed him — a statement that streamer had retracted and apologized for seven years before the endorsement. El-Sayed, for his part, wrote in 2021 about watching "terrorists with names like mine attack my country in the name of my faith," and called the attacks devastating.

We have documented the same habit on Iran, where Rogers spent two decades insisting Iran was building a nuclear weapon while U.S. intelligence kept concluding it wasn't — and Michigan drivers are paying for the war he wanted.

The through-line is that Rogers keeps making his national security record bigger than the record. Sometimes that means inflating what he did. Sometimes it means inventing what his opponent said. Here it means telling donors he saw the body himself when he was at home in Washington waiting on a phone call.

What the record shows

Mike Rogers (MI) told donors in a fundraising email, in bold type, that he saw Osama bin Laden's dead body with his own eyes. He was not in Abbottabad and not in the Situation Room. He was at home in Washington, and learned about the raid in a phone call from the CIA director. What he actually saw, days later, was a photograph — the same photograph he spent that week publicly arguing the government should not release, in his own words, because conspiracy theorists "aren't going to believe the photos." His campaign would not explain the discrepancy.

Source

Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers says he saw Bin Laden's body with his 'own eyes'. He did not — Robert Mackey, The Guardian, August 29, 2026. Photo: Paul Sancya / AP.