Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers falsely claimed he saw Osama bin Laden's dead body "with my own eyes," according to reports.
Rogers is the GOP nominee for the open Senate seat in Michigan, where he's running a campaign against progressive Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed. In a fundraising email, Rogers claimed, "I saw the dead body of Osama bin Laden with my own eyes, knowing that together, we had delivered justice for America."
In the same fundraising email, Rogers noted that he "served as a U.S. Army officer and an FBI special agent," and "dedicated my life to keeping our families safe - working in the shadows, hunting down terrorists, standing on the frontlines of our national security."
However, Rogers was not in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011, when Bin Laden was shot and killed, nor was he in the White House Situation Room, where former President Barack Obama and senior administration officials such as Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton followed the raid in real time, The Guardian reported.
The Guardian pointed out that Rogers told reporters that he was at home in Washington, D.C., when Bin Laden was killed and was informed about the raid by Obama's CIA director, Leon Panetta.
In a post on X, journalist Azi Paybarah also dug up a 2011 Roll Call article in which Rogers, who at the time was the House Intelligence Chairman, claimed that he saw photos of bin Laden's dead body. According to the article, he told CNN the photos were "pretty gruesome."
"Brian Williams had to resign for a less egregious exaggeration," journalist Ray Locker noted in a post on X, referring to the former NBC anchor. "Rogers made it seem as if he peered inside bin Laden's body bag at the end of Zero Dark Thirty instead of looking at a photo."