WASHINGTON — Michele Bachmann will announce whether or not she'll run for president in Waterloo, Iowa, the town where she was born, she said late Thursday. The announcement will come sometime in June, but a more specific date was not mentioned.

Bachmann, who was due to be in Iowa at the time of announcement, was instead stuck in Washington as the House called late votes on a renewal of the Patriot Act. Instead, a group of reporters including several nationals who had flown to Iowa in preparation for her speech at a fundraiser there, huddled around a speakerphone for a press conference call.

It was then that she made the announcement. MinnPost, while not in Des Moines, verified the content of the announcement with multiple Bachmann staffers. Bachmann will leave for Iowa Friday morning. She will be in New Hampshire from late Sunday through early Wednesday.

Bachmann has long said that her announcement will be independent of what any other candidate might do, and she repeated that today after news broke that Sarah Palin would be traveling to early voting states on a bus tour. "My decision will be made on whether I think it is the right thing at the right time and we'll let you know in June," she told CNN's John King, on his John King, USA show.

Should she run, Bachmann would be pointing toward the Iowa Straw Poll, held in Ames in mid-August, in hopes of using that as a good bouncing-off point to show strength in the first-in-the-nation caucus state. She has said she'll have organizations in all three of the first states — Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — though by far her strongest state right now is Iowa.

When she first traveled to Des Moines as a presidential aspirant in January, she told the crowd at that "it's good to be home." When she announces, it will be from her hometown.

Read more on Bachmann's gearing up to a possible presidential bid here.