Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann suggested she may wait to endorse whomever wins the Republican nomination in her first appearance Wednesday on MSNBC since dropping out of the presidential race.

"My decision’s already made. I’m on board with whoever the nominee will be, because I’m all in for defeating Barack Obama in the upcoming election," Bachmann said, adding later, "I just think it’s very clear that we haven’t seen any of the candidates make the final sale."

The remarks cast further doubt that Bachmann will make an endorsement in the coming weeks.

(A report in the Boston Globe that Bachmann was in “negotiations” to endorse Mitt Romney days before the Minnesota caucuses won pushback from the Congresswoman herself, who declared the story “completely false.”)

Asked whether her resistance to endorsing is a signal that the field is weak, Bachmann deferred, drawing a parallel to 2008.

"We saw Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton literally giving each other black eyes,” Bachmann said.
 
“It wasn’t pretty four years ago, on the Democrat side of the ticket,” she continued, adding, “I think once our side decides on a candidate, then we’ll lock arms, we will be all-in together.”

The payroll tax cut fight also came up during her interview.  Bachmann reiterated her opposition to the cut, insisting as she often did during her run that the money was drawn from a “social security trust fund.”

“When you go to the general treasury and open the door to that vault, only moths and feathers fly out.  There’s nothing in there.  We’re broke,” Bachmann said.

Bachmann dropped out of the race on Jan. 4, one day after finishing last among the Republican candidates competing in the Iowa caucuses.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann made light of some of her campaign trail missteps in her first major speech since dropping out of the presidential race.

Bachmann said that running for president is "really one series of humiliations after another" in remarks to Republican activists gathered for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

“I learned three things when I was running for president,” Bachmann continued.  “First of all, I learned where John Wayne was born. That's very important. And then second, I learned the day that Elvis Presley was born. These are vital issues to our republic. And third I learned, never forget the three things that you learned.”

The first two things she learned were facts she famously got wrong along the way -- the third thing, of course, is a reference to what Texas Gov. Rick Perry forgot during a CNBC debate in Michigan last November.

But Bachmann did not seem to have forgotten many of the themes that undergirded the last few months of her presidential run, which were marked by daily attacks on President Obama’s foreign policy.

“Without a shadow of a doubt he world is a better off without bin Laden and without Gadhafi," Bachmann said, before adding: "These are tactical successes that don't begin to compare with the mess Barack Obama has made of the Middle East.”

Reviving a major theme of her candidacy, Bachmann attacked President Obama for the events of the Arab Spring, arguing that Obama should have defended Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak against the movement.

“Obama failed to stand by Mubarak,” Bachmann said, “and that helped fuel the revolution in Egypt, and it led to a regime that was based on Sharia Law, with 72 percent of the seats in the lower house in Egypt now occupied by the Brotherhood.”

Turning to another theme Bachmann hit often on the trail, she hit Obama for the pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq, and the planned drawdown in Afghanistan.

“Only Obama could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and call it success,” Bachmann said.

Almost one month after abandoning her presidential campaign, Michele Bachmann today announced that she will be running for re-election to Congress in Minnesota.

Word of her plans, first conveyed to the Associated Press during a Jan. 25 interview, puts to rest questions about what Bachmann’s career would hold after her run for the GOP presidential nomination catapulted her into national headlines.

Bachmann was elected to Congress in 2006, during the year that Democrats swept congressional elections and took over majority of the US House and Senate.

Citing “the absolute need” to repeal the federal health-care law and the banking regulations embedded in the Dodd-Frank legislation, Bachmann declared in an email today that she is “not done."

“Our campaign [for president] changed the focus of this presidential election.”

Meanwhile, Bachmann’s presidential campaign still carries debt up to $447,000, according to 4th quarter numbers released Tuesday.

Bachmann ended her campaign on Jan. 4, one day after finishing in sixth place in the Iowa caucuses, last among the candidates competing in the state.

TAMPLA, FL -- Michele Bachmann's campaign is denying the Minnesota congresswoman has either endorsed or ruled out supporting a candidate following the circulation of a fraudulent news release in South Carolina.

A release, which appears to show the Minnesota congresswoman denouncing Newt Gingrich two weeks after Bachmann ended her campaign, was distributed by email to voters in South Carolina yesterday.

The campaign's former communications director, Alice Stewart, issued this response: "The Bachmann for President campaign has not issued an official statement regarding an endorsement of any current candidate in the GOP race ahead of the South Carolina primary. Any information found to the contrary is inaccurate."

NBC News has obtained a copy of the release, which was printed on campaign letterhead and made to look like a news release sent on behalf of the candidate herself. 

The release promises an endorsement in the "coming weeks," but notes, "through this exhaustive process of consideration, it was strikingly obvious that one candidate could not be less acceptable to be our Party's nominee." 

Describing a candidate lacking "poise, experience and moral fibre," the release names Gingrich, calling him "desperately flawed."

If nothing else, the incident demonstrates that Bachmann's voice is valuable enough to counterfeit, and it marks the second time in a week that former top aides have complained her name is being misused.

On Friday, campaign manager Keith Nahigian directed a lawyer to ask South Carolina radio stations to take down an advertisement he said created the false impression she is endorsing the former House speaker.

MIAMI, FL –- An email posing questions about traditional Christianity’s view of the role of women in political life is the subject of a bitter complaint today by a former member of Rep. Michele Bachmann’s presidential campaign. 

The email was sent last summer from the personal account of an Iowa staffer working for former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. It was first reported Friday by the Des Moines Register.

The email reads, in part: "Is it Gods highest desire, that is, His biblically expressed will... to have a woman rule the institutions of the Family, the Church, and the State?"

Reached by telephone Saturday, the author of the email -- Jamie Johnson -- told NBC News his email has been "blown way out of proportion," and does not represent official campaign correspondence.  

Johnson, who is a pastor at a central Iowa church, is Santorum’s “Iowa coalitions director,” tasked with building support among the state’s evangelical community.

"I was sharing my personal reflections with a friend through my private email account -– not the campaign account," Johnson said. “They were reflections on over 25 years of formal, theological study” based in “classical Christian doctrine.”

But the email, passed this summer from its recipient to a member of the Bachmann campaign, is raising questions about attitudes inside the evangelical voting bloc over which Bachmann and Santorum competed in the run-up to the Jan. 3 caucuses.  

Santorum finished a close second in the contest; Bachmann finished in last place among those competing and dropped out of the presidential race the next day.

Peter Waldron, who lives in Florida and worked nationally Iowa as Bachmann’s “faith outreach coordinator,” says that “misogyny was a serious issue in Iowa” -- and argues that “medieval attitudes” are to blame, in part, for his candidate’s weak showing.

He is today demanding an apology from Santorum over a “sexist strategy” in the state, sending a press release only hours before Santorum won the support of a key meeting of national evangelical leaders.

Citing Johnson’s email, Waldron makes this charge: “Evangelical surrogates [for Santorum] promoted the idea that a female cannot be an elected official or a commander-in-chief.”

(Waldron, who has managed Christian outreach for Republican candidates since Ronald Reagan’s 1980 run, received a rash of press himself this summer, over his 2006 arrest in Uganda on terrorism charges.  He tells NBC News he was there on a Christian mission, and his arrest had to do with his opposition to the sitting president's effort to force a third term through the legislature.)

Native observers of political and religious life in Iowa are more measured, but acknowledge a debate over Bachmann's gender emerged in churches after her presidential fortunes slipped.

"I know of pastors who were supporting her before the [Aug. 13] straw poll, and then I saw pastors try to tell everybody when she was plummeting in the polls that we needed male leadership," says the Des Moines-based, nationally-syndicated radio host Steve Deace, who is supporting former House Speaker Newt Gingrich for president.

"She was trying to get elected as a woman," Deace adds about Bachmann. "And I think in general people in both parties are more comfortable voting for men. Just ask Hillary Clinton." 

MIAMI -- Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann’s campaign for president may be over, but top aides are still rushing to her defense.

Bachmann’s former campaign manager, Keith Nahigian, directed a lawyer Friday to write South Carolina radio stations to ask them to stop playing an advertisement he says is funded by the group Winning our Future, a super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich.

Nahigian says the ad, apparently called "Bachmann," uses archival tape of the former candidate praising Gingrich in order to create the impression she's endorsing him.  (Winning our Future did not immediately respond to an email from NBC News.  The ad does not seem to be available online.)

According to a transcript provided by Nahigian, Bachmann says of Gingrich's time as speaker of the House, “He made an indelible mark that literally changed the United States,” adding, “he was almost better known than our president during those years.”

A narrator says: “Michele Bachmann is right.  Newt helped change history once.  He can do it again.”

Nahigian says the audio dates to the 2008 Republican National Convention, in St. Paul.  Bachmann, running for re-election in her nearby district, invited Gingrich to speak at a fundraiser for her campaign.

“Congresswoman Bachman has not endorsed Speaker Gingrich, nor any other candidate for the Presidency,” the letter from Bachmann's lawyer reads.  “Your station must fulfill its responsibility to operate in the public interest and cease airing [Winning our Future’s] radio advertisement immediately.”

The Bachmann campaign ground to a halt a little more than a week ago.  Nahigian, back from a brief vacation, calls this brewing fight “small little stuff,” though “ironic."

“The words that came out of her mouth [at the 2008 event] were written by his staff, of how to introduce him,” Nahigian says, of Gingrich.  “They’re not even her own thoughts.”

WEST DES MOINES, Iowa –- Before a handful of supporters and members of her Iowa staff, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann today announced that she’s dropping out of the presidential race, the morning after a disappointing finish in the Iowa caucuses.

“Last night, the people of Iowa spoke with a very clear voice,” Bachmann said. “And so I have decided to stand aside.”

She finished in sixth-place in the caucuses, a stunning reversal of fortune for a candidate whose early surge in polls propelled her to victory in the state’s straw poll, less than five months ago.

But Bachmann’s support had steadily waned since that win in August, despite efforts large and small to win Iowa voters. Only last week, Bachmann finished a grueling, 11-day bus tour of the state’s 99 counties.
 
And from the start, Bachmann emphasized having grown up here in Iowa, where she said she learned about simple values, such as thrift and plain-talk.

“I came here to this wonderful state of Iowa,” Bachmann said this morning, of her presidential run. “I had just one message. To tell you that I mean what I say, and I say what I mean.”

As if to prove her point, Bachmann’s remarks this morning re-iterated much of her stump message, casting her fight against President Obama’s national health-care law in grand, historical terms.

Referring to a painting hanging in the U.S. Capitol depicting the signing of the Constitution, Bachmann said the “poignant reminder” of our “fragile republic” called her to action during the 2010 debate over health care. The evening the bill was passed, Bachmann said, she decided to run for president.

“I ran because I believe that since Day 1, Barack Obama's policies, based on socialism, are destructive to the very foundation of the republic,” she added, using an attack on President Obama she had debuted only weeks ago, as part of her closing argument to Iowans.

Bachmann’s husband, Marcus, and much of her family -– including her mother, her three brothers, and her five children –- joined her on stage. The event, brief and low key, followed several frantic hours of media activity after reporters were instructed early this morning to return to the same West Des Moines ballroom where last night Bachmann had told supporters she would fight on.

The campaign’s scheduled trip to South Carolina had clearly been put on hold.

Sources close to the campaign say the candidate huddled with top staffers aboard her bus late into last night, but the decision was ultimately hers alone.

“It’s a very big decision, and she made it,” a top staffer said. “All on her terms.”

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann's campaign lost another high-ranking staff member on Thursday after that staffer defended another former Bachmann official's defection to a rival campaign.

Wes Enos, Bachmann's political director, has left the campaign, spokeswoman Alice Stewart confirmed to NBC News on Thursday evening.

The resignation comes on the heels of last night's announcement by Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson, who had served as Bachmann's Iowa chairman, that he had stepped down from that position to support Texas Rep. Ron Paul's campaign instead.

Yesterday, Enos publicly defended Sorenson, an Iowa state Senator, against charges voiced by Bachmann that Sorenson had accepted money from the Paul campaign, in violation of state law. (This narrative is disputed by Sorenson himself.)

"I can't in good conscious watch a good man like Kent Sorenson be attacked as a sell-out," Enos told NBC News on Wednesday night, insisting that Sorenson felt personal loyalty to colleagues in the state legislature backing Paul.

A similar statement from Enos was released via the Ron Paul campaign shortly after midnight today.

Reached via text message today, Enos told NBC News, of his departure from the Bachmann campaign: "It was a mutual thing. I knew when I undermined [Bachmann's] statement last night that I effectively was tendering my resignation."

Enos adds he has no "ill will" toward Bachmann.

That hasn't stalled the emerging feud between the Bachmann and Paul campaigns.

Bachmann re-iterated her charge against Sorenson at a campaign stop on Thursday, saying that Sorenson had told her he had been "offered a great deal of money" to support Ron Paul, but had given her campaign assurances he would stay.

"He said that he would be staying. He was with me at our campaign stop in Indianola," Bachmann said.

Sorenson joined Bachmann at a Pizza Ranch in Indianola yesterday, where he spoke with voters as he stood by Bachmann's side. Later, he declined to speak on her behalf, citing dental work he had received earlier in the day.

“I’m numb, so I’m afraid I’ll start drooling," Sorenson told the crowd, to laughs.

Today, Bachmann told reporters that, "He told all of our campaign that he was definitely on board and then he got in his car and he went and announced that he was going with the Ron Paul campaign."

The visit to the Indianola event followed a discussion over the phone Tuesday, Bachmann said, in which Sorenson told her he had been offered a "great deal of money" to defect to the Paul campaign. 

Updated at 10:12 p.m.

One of the most prominent Iowa supporters of Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann's presidential campaign jumped ship late Wednesday, announcing just days before the state's Jan. 3 caucus that he would instead back Texas Rep. Ron Paul.

Iowa state Sen. Kent Sorenson, one of three Iowa co-chairmen for Bachmann's campaign, made an appearance at a Veterans for Ron Paul event this evening where he endorsed the Texas congressman in Tuesday's caucuses.

Sorenson, in a statement distributed by Paul's campaign, said he had "an immense amount of respect" for Bachmann, but had essentially judged her to have fallen out of contention in the caucuses.

"I believe we have a clear choice here in Iowa and, I believe, across the country," he told NBC News in an interview after the event.
"All the recent polling is showing that Ron is in a neck and neck race with Mitt Romney.  I believe that we have a real opportunity to elect a constitutional conservative."

Sorenson further characterized his decision as a "spur-of-the-moment" one.

Bachmann accused Sorenson of being a sell-out in a statement released Wednesday evening.

"Kent Sorenson personally told me he was offered a large sum of money to go to work for the Paul campaign," she said, accusing Paul of trying to stymie her campaign's momentum. "Kent said to me yesterday that 'everyone sells out in Iowa, why shouldn't I,' then he told me he would stay with our campaign. The Ron Paul campaign has to answer for its actions."

In a follow-up interview, Sorenson categorically denied having received any offer of compensation by Paul's campaign.

"Listen, that's absurd. Like I said before, people on this campaign supported me in my race. They worked tirelessly for me. They stuffed envelopes, they door knocked for me," he said. "I feel like I'm coming home to them."

While he hasn't been particularly busy on the campaign trail for the Minnesota congresswoman, Sorenson was missing from a Bachmann campaign stop this afternoon in Osceola, Iowa; he told NBC News at a subsequent event in Indianola that he hadn't been on the Bachmann trail earlier today because he was having a root canal. Both events preceded his appearance this evening with Paul.

The defection carries a degree of symbolic importance, however. Sorenson was one of the first people to join the Bachmann campaign outside of her DC and Minnesota staff. In fact, even before Bachmann made the final decision to get in the race, he was urging her to run. Sorenson was also involved when Bachmann's closest political advisers from Minnesota and D.C. bolted the campaign, saying they disagreed on Iowa strategy.

The news came after a new CNN/TIME poll released Wednesday showed Bachmann in last place, at nine percent among Republican likely caucus-goers, among Republicans actively competing in the Jan. 3 contest. Paul, by contrast, trailed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by just three points -- good enough for second place, and within the poll's margin of error.

James Novogrod / NBC News

Tamara Scott and former Iowa state Rep. Danny Carroll, increasingly visible surrogates for Michele Bachmann, speaking at an Ottumwa, Iowa, restaurant Thursday night.

By NBC's James Novogrod

BLOOMFIELD, Iowa -- Michele Bachmann’s 99-county bus tour reached the eight-day mark Friday, and the candidate was losing her voice.  In a whisper she circulated tables at the Oasis Coffee House, greeting voters, autographing yard signs and posing for photos.

While the grueling schedule left Bachmann quieter than usual, a group of surrogates raised the volume this week on a message the campaign hopes will resonate among Iowa’s evangelical voters, in the run-up to the Jan. 3 caucus.

“Do you know that the qualifications for public office are found in the Bible?” asked Danny Carroll, a former state representative, during a visit to a restaurant in Albia on Thursday.

Carroll was citing a passage in Exodus in which Moses is counseled to trust those who "feared God, were capable, and hated dishonest gain."

“I believe that Michele Bachmann fits all of those qualifications,” he added.

Carroll, who has supported Bachmann since the summer, has hosted her at his farm in Grinnell – but had rarely joined her for public events around the state.  His presence, the campaign says, sends a signal to Iowan social conservatives.

“He has a tremendous amount of credibility in that state, and people look to his opinion,” says campaign spokeswoman Alice Stewart.

After a 12-year career in the Iowa statehouse, Carroll was chairman of the board of the Iowa Family Policy Center, a group that was later spun into the Family Leader, one of Iowa’s most high-profile evangelical groups.

Carroll's message seems designed in part to punch back at the Family Leader's current CEO, Bob Vander Plaats, who earlier this week endorsed one of Bachmann's chief rivals for the evangelical vote: Rick Santorum.

The endorsement directed unwelcome attention on the Bachmann campaign, after Politico reported that Vander Plaats had tried to influence the race more directly, by calling Bachmann to urge her to drop out.

Bachmann acknowledges the call happened, but disputes the account of the discussion.  (A source close to the telephone call tells NBC News that Vander Plaats called to ask that she merge her ticket with Santorum, or with Rick Perry. Bachmann, according to the source, declined.)

Since the endorsement, the Bachmann camp’s pushback has been polite but sharp. 

A second surrogate, Tamara Scott – the Iowa director of a conservative women's group, Concerned Women for America – called out the Family Leader and Santorum by name Thursday, during a stop in Ottumwa.

"The Iowa Family Leader had a series of meetings, and the papers said it was to make sure [Mitt] Romney was not the nominee," Scott said.

"Bob Vander Plaats turned around and endorsed Santorum, who had endorsed Romney in the last election.  I just don’t understand those kinds of politics," Scott said.

In an interview with NBC, Scott stressed that she is not speaking on behalf of Concerned Women for America, and added that Bachmann was the only candidate she felt comfortable endorsing.

“Her integrity is intact,” Scott said.

The effect of the campaign’s effort is unclear so far, but the bus tour itself has seemed to win points in rural counties.  Voters in small restaurants and bakeries often said they appreciated Bachmann’s attention.

“She stands for Iowa,” said caucus-goer Kay Rouch, in Keosauqua, on Wednesday.  “This is where her roots are, her beginnings, and I think that she basically has a real concern for the people in the Midwest.”