This is making the rounds at Gawker, Mediaite, and elsewhere thanks to a “fact check” National Journal sent out about her answer on Pakistan. I’m 99 percent sure it’s a bad rap. Writes Yochi Dreazen:

During the CNN debate, Bachmann said that 15 Pakistani nuclear sites were vulnerable to jihadist attacks, and that six of the sites had previously come under some form of Islamist attack. U.S. intelligence and military officials believe that Pakistan has 15 nuclear sites, but no U.S. official has publicly said that all of the sites were vulnerable to militant attack or confirmed that any of them had previously come under any form of jihadist attack.

Did Bachmann lift those numbers from a tippy-top secret meeting of the House Intel Committee? Or did she lift them from the blockbuster Jeffrey Goldberg/Marc Ambinder piece on Pakistan that The Atlantic published less than three weeks ago? Quote:

At least six facilities widely believed to be associated with Pakistan’s nuclear program have already been targeted by militants. In November 2007, a suicide bomber attacked a bus carrying workers to the Sargodha air base, which is believed to house nuclear weapons; the following month, a school bus was attacked outside Kamra air base, which may also serve as a nuclear storage site; in August 2008, Pakistani Taliban suicide bombers attacked what experts believe to be the country’s main nuclear-weapons-assembly depot in Wah cantonment. If jihadists are looking to raid a nuclear facility, they have a wide selection of targets: Pakistan is very secretive about the locations of its nuclear facilities, but satellite imagery and other sources suggest that there are at least 15 sites across Pakistan at which jihadists could find warheads or other nuclear materials.

They even published a map showing where the suspected sites are and specifying which ones had been attacked. Watch her answer from last night, which comes at the beginning of the clip below. Her one very slight departure from The Atlantic piece is in claiming that all 15 sites are “potentially penetrable” by jihadists, which is something that Goldberg and Ambinder never quite assert — although they do imply the hell out of it. One of the big horrifying scoops from that piece was the possibility that Pakistani intel is driving around in traffic in lightly guarded civilian vehciles with fully assembled nuclear weapons in the trunk. Given that insane degree of recklessness, how much of a leap is it to think all of their nuclear facilities are vulnerable?

Lest you still doubt that she’s getting this info from Goldberg and Ambinder instead of from a congressional briefing, note that her buzzworthy line about Pakistan being “too nuclear to fail” is also a direct lift from The Atlantic piece. Stephen Cohen, a Brookings scholar, used that phrase to explain why the world can’t walk away from Pakistan and let it succumb to its cultural pathologies, as it richly deserves to do. Obviously Bachmann read this piece recently and it made an impression on her, as it did with everyone else who read it. She should have cited it in her answer to make sure everyone understood she wasn’t spilling secrets, but that’s a venial sin, not a mortal one.