“It was not a purge of neoconservatives,” he said. “It was more mundane and grotesque than that. It was part of an ongoing power play by [AEI Vice President for Foreign and Defense Policy Studies] Danielle Plekta. She’s someone who makes Hillary [Rodham Clinton] look pleasant and soft by comparison. She’s pathologically self-serving. She, personally, drove Jeanne Kirkpatrick from AEI by being relentlessly abusive to her. And she has no conceivable qualifications for being in her position in the first place.”

Muravchik is starting to promote his new book “The Next Founders,” about democracy in the Middle East, which he said was completed despite Pletka’s attacks on his travel budget.