Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) will remain a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during the 113th Congress — despite leading a widely discredited anti-Muslim witch hunt against government personnel last year.

According to the committee list released Friday, Bachmann will stay on the powerful committee despite calls from People for the American Way and others for Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) to remove her. Instead, Boehner in his statement making the announcement praised the lawmakers “charged sacred task of supporting that mission by ensuring the intelligence community has the resources and tools it needs to stay ahead of the evolving threats we face, and by conducting effective oversight of the administration.”

Dismay towards Bachmann’s continuing presence on the committee stems from her use of that position to lead a witch-hunt against then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s top aide Huma Abedin and other U.S. government personnel. In the letter sent to the State Department, Bachmann suggested that Abedin and others were allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, seeking to infiltrate the U.S. government and affect policy decisions. The charges were clearly false, based mostly on the conspiracy theories of noted Islamophobe Frank Gaffney.

Bachmann’s actions split the Republican Party, with several prominent members — including former Speaker Newt Gingrich and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton — signing onto her conspiracies. Many other Republicans — including Boehner himself — abandoned Bachmann to her quixotic pursuit of imaginary infiltration. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), then-Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) and others joined President Obama and Clinton in condemning Bachmann’s scare tactics.

Joining Bachmann in being renamed to the committee are Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-GA) and Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL), who signed onto the original letter sent to State about Abedin. The clearly Islamophobic stances of these committee members makes their position on the committee, with its oversight of the National Security Agency and CIA’s activities, particularly troubling.

Bachmann in particular clearly learned nothing from her experience smearing Abedin. Not only did she stand by the content of her letter to State, as recently as December, but she also compared a letter from a Muslim advocacy group to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. (HT: Faiz Shakir)

David Horowitz’s anti-Muslim rhetoric has been well-docmented as he is featured prominently in CAP’s report last year on the Islamophobia network in the United States. So it’s no surprise then that on Fox News today Horowitz pushed the right-wing conspiracy theory that Huma Abedin, top aide to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is a Muslim Brotherhood plant.

Fox Host Megyn Kelly referred to Horowitz as a “civil rights activist” and asked what he thought of the police questioning of the man behind the anti-Islam film that caused recent protests in the Middle East. “This is one of the most disgraceful moments in the history of the American presidency,” Horowitz said (the filmmaker, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, answered police questions voluntarily). Horowitz then brought up Abedin:

HOROWITZ: An American ambassador has been raped and tortured and murdered and the White House is focusing on or the Justice Department is focusing on a filmmaker. And you have to ask yourself, isn’t it not the fact that the chief adviser on Muslim affairs for Hillary Clinton, our Secretary of State is a Muslim Brotherhood operative and the Obama administration has turned over Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood which is a Nazi organization –

At this point, Kelly interrupted Horowitz, not to say he was wrong about Abedin but only to say “there are questions” as to whether she is a Muslim Brotherhood plant. Watch the clip:

No, Huma Abedin is not part of a Muslim Brotherhood plot to take over the U.S. government and no, David Horowitz is not a civil rights activist.