It was only a matter of time before Michele Bachmann’s allies tried to play the victim following the backlash against her latest conspiratorial witch hunt, this time focusing on Muslim-Americans serving in the Obama administration. Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, who helped launch the attacks on Sec. Hillary Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin and whose report Bachmann and four other Republican members cite in their letters to the inspectors general, spoke today with David Bossie of the right-wing group Citizens United to defend the witch hunt.

Bossie said that Bachmann’s main problem was naming Abedin in the State Department letter, which was rebuffed by the inspector general, when she should have tried to “name her without naming her.” He claimed that people are attacking Bachmann because she tries “to defend our freedoms” and represents a “danger” to their nefarious plans. Gaffney, who has made a career disparaging people like Abedin and even conservatives such as Grover Norquist, lamented that there is “an effort to demonize and take down” Bachmann.

Bossie: These five members of Congress led by Michele Bachmann, because they just hate her so, because they just have this natural desire to attack her at every turn because she’s decided to pick up a weapon and stand a post, she decided that she was going to defend our freedoms at every turn for many years. So certainly if I was in her camp, would I have said ‘hey let’s ask these questions, let’s do all this without putting a staffer’s name in it,’ because as a former staffer, as a guy who was the chief investigator for Congress during the ’90s and somebody who investigated the Clinton’s relentlessly and whose name was in letters like this all the time from the left, Republicans stood tall for me at every turn because members didn’t like members picking on staffers, at least how it’s presumed. So you could see how that could be perceived. I would have probably said, ‘let’s name her without naming her,’ that’s one way to solve what potentially happened. But they want to attack Michele Bachmann for what is really an oversight in my opinion by naming her, but they want to attack her because she’s been a leader against the Muslim Brotherhood, against radical Islam, for the last four years that she has been in the House of Representatives and they see her as a danger, as a leader who is dangerous in their pursuits. Gaffney: That’s the point. It’s really an effort to demonize and take down, if they can, a formidable political adversary in Michele Bachmann.

If Bachmann really was the courageous leader that Bossie and Gaffney described, it’s hard to see why she literally ran away from a CNN reporter who was asking her questions about the letters, and if people are only criticizing Bachmann because they detest her attempts to “defend our freedoms,” then leading Republicans like John McCain, Marco Rubio, John Boehner and Mike Rogers must be included on that list.

Bossie also took to Politico to defend the congresswoman and her Republican allies, saying they “should be applauded for their letter and be regarded as patriots”: