When Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign announced that Barack Obama would join him on the campaign trail later this month, media outlets and prominent online voices quickly sounded the alarm—the Michigan Senate candidate, it turned out, had voiced strong criticisms of the former president.

On Wednesday, CNN traced El-Sayed’s comments from the time of Obama’s 2012 reelection through the 2020 presidential campaign, zeroing in on a 2012 HuffPost piece where El-Sayed wrote that the former president did not deliver on the promise of “hope and substantial change” during his first term but instead “perpetuated war, violated our civil liberties, deported more people........

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