“A Teaparty Tipping Point”: Michele Bachmann Returns To The House Intelligence Committee
The Tea Party ain’t over. Case in point: last week, former presidential candidate and unflagging conspiracy theorist Michele Bachmann announced that, despite the understandable outcry, she has been assigned yet again to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in the new congressional term.
Today, People For the American Way delivered 178,000 petitions to House Speaker John Boehner urging him to remove Bachmann from the Intelligence Committee. Members of the House Intelligence Committee are entrusted with classified information that affects the safety and security of all Americans,” the petition reads. “That information should not be in the hands of anyone with such a disregard for honesty, misunderstanding of national security, and lack of respect for his or her fellow public servants.” Boehner should take these concerns seriously. Instead, he has rewarded Bachmann’s reckless extremism with continued access to classified information and another term on a powerful committee.
This didn’t need to happen and it certainly shouldn’t have. More than a few comedians have pointed out the irony of Michele Bachmann being appointed to the “Intelligence” Committee in the first place. But on the Intelligence Committee the Minnesota congresswoman is no joke. Last year, Bachmann went too far, even by her own low standards, when she urged the Defense and Justice Departments to investigate what she alleged were Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, claiming that the Islamist group had achieved Manchurian Candidate-style “deep penetration” into the U.S. government. Her allegations were supported only by her delusionary distrust of Muslim-Americans and by the rantings of anti-Islam activist Frank Gaffney. Meanwhile, she was rebuked by many of her fellow Republicans, including Sen. John McCain, who called the accusations “an unwarranted and unfounded attack on an honorable woman, a dedicated American and a loyal public servant,” and Boehner, who said the claims were “pretty dangerous.” Even her own former campaign manager Ed Rollins called her attacks “downright vicious” and compared her unhinged witch hunt to that of the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
Since then, despite having no evidence, she’s hasn’t moderated her rhetoric. At September’s Values Voter Summit, she claimed that a decision by the FBI to stop using flawed anti-Muslim training materials amounted to President Obama enforcing “Islamic speech codes.” In subsequent radio interviews, she claimed that the president wanted to impose Sharia law at home and abroad.
Bachmann of course promotes a wide range of conspiracy theories — including the theory that the HPV vaccine causes mental retardation and that people who fill out the census will end up in concentration camps. But her wild claims about anti-Americanism in the halls of government have a direct bearing on her position on the Intelligence Committee and they’re where we should draw the line. Bachmann’s often laughable crackpot theories are no longer funny when they involve our national security.
Apparently Speaker Boehner disagrees. While he made headlines last year for condemning Bachmann’s dangerous crusade, he has yet to take any action to stop it. Bachmann and the Tea Party have proven time and again that they don’t take the business of governing seriously. Boehner and his fellow Republican leaders should stop pretending like they do.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, January 14, 2013
“Witchy Woman”: Republicans Line Up To Rip Michele Bachmann
They were long afraid to do it, but now conservatives have their knives out for Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Senators in her own party, congressional candidates, a lawmaker in her state’s delegation and leaders of the House Republican Conference are all lambasting the Minnesota Republican for saying the wife of former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said merely floating the idea that Huma Abedin — a top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — has family ties to the radical Middle East group is “pretty dangerous.”
“I don’t know Huma, but from everything I do know of her, she has a sterling character,” Boehner told reporters Thursday. “And I think accusations like this being thrown around are pretty dangerous.” Later on CNN, Boehner said he expects to speak to Bachmann soon.
Bachmann’s accusation came in a handful of letters to intelligence and national security agencies raising questions about the Muslim Brotherhood. The letters, also signed by four other Republicans, specifically mentioned Abedin, accusing her late father of having ties to the Brotherhood.
Boehner declined to entertain a reporter’s question about whether he would toss Bachmann off the Intelligence Committee, where she’s privy to highly classified information. Behind the scenes, leadership aides said they were shaken by the comments from someone as prominent as Bachmann.
And Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, was described by several sources as incredibly angry when he heard of the incident.
The Republican backlash against Bachmann started with Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) statement on the Senate floor Wednesday, saying she had made “sinister accusations.”
Rep. Jeff Flake, a conservative Arizona lawmaker running for Senate, tweeted “Kudos to @SenJohnMcCain for his statement on Senate floor yesterday defending Clinton aide. Well said.”
Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) added: “Rep. Bachmann’s accusations about Sec. Clinton aide Huma Abedin are out-of-line. This kind of rhetoric has no place in our public discourse.”
Even the Minnesota delegation is dispensing with its characteristic niceness. Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison, a Muslim who served in the state Legislature with Bachmann in St. Paul, said it’s not personal, but Bachmann is out of line.
“It’s not right to question the loyalty of fellow Americans without any evidence,” said Ellison, whose district is based in Minneapolis. “I object when people do that.”
Bachmann has said her letters “are unfortunately being distorted.”
And while she did not specifically mention Abedin in a follow-up comment, Bachmann is not backing down from her premise of looking into threats from the Muslim Brotherhood: “I will not be silent as this administration appeases our enemies instead of telling the truth about the threats our country faces.”
She elaborated during an interview Thursday with conservative radio host Glenn Beck.
“She is the chief aide … to the Secretary of State,” Bachmann said of Abedin. “And we quoted from the document, and this has been well reported all across Arab media, that her father, her late father who is now deceased was a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, her brother was a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, and her mother was part of what’s called the Muslim Sisterhood.”
Yet more and more Republicans seem to feel more comfortable coming out publicly against Bachmann now — perhaps because she’s no longer engaged in a presidential primary and has returned to the House as a rank-and-file lawmaker.
Ed Rollins, her former presidential campaign manager, said in a post on Fox News’s website that Bachmann has “difficulty with her facts.”
Former New Jersey GOP Gov. Christine Todd Whitman wrote in POLITICO’s Arena, that “the sort of unfounded attack unleashed by Congresswoman Bachmann and her [colleagues] brings back painful memories of a low point in our history.”
Former Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, a recently retired Florida Republican, said “Michele means well but she sometimes doesn’t let proven facts get in the way of a possibility of having national television coverage.”
“Michele would be better served by having competent staff to check out these accusations before she goes out there sometimes appearing to be a ‘bomb thrower,’” Brown-Waite wrote on POLITICO.
Bachmann’s fundraising prowess remains impressive, but requests for donations seem dire. One last month was labeled “URGENT note from Michele,” and urged folks to pony up for her reelection effort against a self-funder who she said “will be able to keep pouring in millions of his own money to defeat me.” Her opponent is Jim Graves, a Minnesota businessman.
“My opponent just released his financial numbers and it will blow you away. His net worth is approximately $111 million. Yes, you read that correctly. One hundred and eleven million dollars,” according to a fundraising email June 26.
She remains a top House fundraiser, bringing in $1.8 million in the second quarter, bringing the total in her campaign account to $1.72 million. At this point in the previous cycle, she had $2.4 million on hand.
The question many Republicans and Democrats alike ask is whether her district — outside St. Paul — truly cares about issues like the allegations she made regarding Abedin.
“They know what she says, they know what she does,” Ellison told POLITICO. “Her district knows her. They know her well. We came into this place together. My district knows me, her district knows her. I guess they either like what she’s saying or they don’t dislike it enough to get rid of her. That’s it.”
By: Jake Sherman, Politico, July 19, 2012
“A Dangerous And Crazy Bigot”: The End Of Michele Bachmann?
Following John McCain’s condemnation of Michele Bachmann’s letter to the Department of State’s Inspector General, demanding an investigation of imagined ties of Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin to the Muslim Brotherhood, other Republicans are piling on.
GOP strategist Ed Rollins, who at one time managed Bachmann’s failed presidential campaign, weighed in at Fox News:
Having worked for Congressman Bachmann’s campaign for president, I am fully aware that she sometimes has difficulty with her facts, but this is downright vicious and reaches the late Senator Joe McCarthy level…
The Republican Party, which John McCain led as our nominee in 2008, is going to become irrelevant if we become the party of intolerance and hate. The party founded by Abraham Lincoln was a party that fought slavery and intolerance at every level.
I can assure Mrs. Bachmann, that Ms. Abedin has been thru every top clearance available and would never have been given her position with any questions of her loyalty to this country.
As a member of Congress, with a seat on the House Intelligence Committee, Mrs. Bachmann you know better. Shame on you, Michele! You should stand on the floor of the House and apologize to Huma Abedin and to Secretary Clinton and to the millions of hardworking, loyal, Muslim Americans for your wild and unsubstantiated charges. As a devoted Christian, you need to ask forgiveness for this grievous lack of judgment and reckless behavior. (emphasis mine)
House Speaker John Boehner today called Bachmann’s accusations “pretty dangerous.”
This appears to be an important moment of Republicans finally trying to dial back the party’s Islamophobia wing, defending public servants from the wild-eyed imaginings of Frank Gaffney’s protégés. Bachmann and the four other signatories to her letter—Republicans Trent Franks (AZ), Louie Gohmert (TX), Thomas Rooney (FL), and Lynn Westmoreland (GA)—open their argument with one of the central lies of Gaffney’s Islamophobia complex: the US government itself, they write, “has established in federal court that the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission in the United States is ‘destroying the Western Civilization from within’—a practice the Muslim Brothers call ‘civilization jihad.’” As a result, they contend, “the apparent involvement of those with such ties raises serious security concerns that warrant your urgent attention.”
Setting aside the fact that Bachmann et al. rely entirely on Gaffney—who has been dismissed by fellow conservatives as a “crazy bigot”—for their unsubstantiated claim that Abedin has Brotherhood ties, their supposed proof of the Brotherhood’s theocratic ambitions in the United States is a fabrication. For her proof, Bachmann cites an exhibit from the US government’s prosecution in the Holy Land Foundation terror financing case. Here’s what I wrote about that exhibit, and that case, over a year ago:
This claim that the Muslim Brotherhood’s aim is a worldwide theocracy, and that all American Muslim organizations fall into lock-step with it, stems solely from a single 20-year-old document written by a single Brotherhood member in 1991. In the controversial terrorism financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation, which first resulted in a mistrial in 2007, and convictions in a 2008 re-trial, federal prosecutors introduced a document, “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America.”
Gaffney and others have seized upon this document developing theories that the goal of “radical Islamists” is a global theocracy and that the Muslim Brotherhood lurks in every corner of America. GWU’s [Nathan] Brown, who testified in the first Holy Land Foundation trial, said, “Nobody has ever produced any evidence that the document was more than something produced by the daydream of one enthusiast.” Noting that he has been studying Palestinian, Egyptian, Kuwaiti, and Jordanian Brotherhood movements since 2005, Brown added, “Nothing in anything that I have heard has ever struck me as similar in tone or content to the ‘master plan.’”
Yet this single document has been used to create a mythology around a supposedly global plot. Brown, addressing the document, notes that “The prosecution in the Holy Land Case painted with a broad brush and probably should not be relied upon. There is indeed a loose coordinating international structure for the Muslim Brotherhood, but it has no real authority over the chapters.” But that hasn’t stopped Gaffney, who said recently, “It is now public knowledge that nearly every major Muslim organization in the United States is actually controlled by the MB or a derivative organization. Consequently, most of the Muslim-American groups of any prominence in America are now known to be, as a matter of fact, hostile to the United States and its Constitution.”
Based on the ‘explanatory memorandum’ document identifying a number of American Muslim organizations as allies in its author’s aspirations, prosecutors in the Holy Land Foundation trial publicly labeled over 200 American Muslim organizations “unindicted co-conspirators,” a highly controversial move derided at the time by legal experts as contrary to Justice Department policy and in violation of the groups’ constitutional rights. Eventually, the court ruled, on the motion of three of the groups, including the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), that publicly identifying them as “unindicted co-conspirators” did violate their Fifth Amendment rights. That didn’t stop The National Review’s Andrew McCarthy—a former federal prosecutor himself—from falsely claiming at CPAC, “those people were all convicted” in the Holy Land Foundation trial.
Meanwhile, the Family Research Council has just appointed Lt. General William G. “Jerry” Boykin (Ret.) as executive vice president. Boykin, among other things, has claimed that “we need to realize that Islam itself is not just a religion—it is a totalitarian way of life. It’s a legal system, shari’ah law; it’s a financial system; it’s a moral code; it’s a political system; it’s a military system. It should not be protected under the First Amendment, particularly given that those following the dictates of the Qur’an are under an obligation to destroy our Constitution and replace it with shari’ah law.” Bachmann is taking heat from fellow Republicans for her attempted witch hunt of Abedin. But will those Republicans back away from the FRC’s Values Voters Summit this fall in protest of Boykin’s history of Islamophobia?
By: Sarah Posner, Religion Dispatches, July 19, 2012
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