Donald Trump-loyal “attorney” Sidney Powell is one of the members of the Republican election-sabotage team who pushed the wildest, and most obviously false, hoaxes to justify Republican demands that Trump’s election loss be overturned Because Reasons. There’s good reason to believe she ought to end up in jail as a key member of an attempted coup, but if she’s working on an insanity defense … it’s going to be a pretty solid one.

In yet another revelation from a new book, aka the practice of hiding information vital for the health of our democracy until you’ve got enough of it collected to charge thirty bucks for it, ABC news guy Jonathan Karl reveals that Powell called Trump intelligence official Ezra Cohen in an apparent panic, during the Republican team’s attempt to cobble together conspiracy theories sufficient to nullify a U.S. election. The reason? She evidently believed the Director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, had been captured in Germany while trying to personally retrieve a secret computer server that would prove something-something election fraud Hillary Clinton blueberry pancake glitter bomb. Or something.

It was a theory wafting around in the batshit layers of QAnon, and here’s Trump’s new election nullifier-slash-lawyer calling the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for intelligence in an absolute panic.

“Gina Haspel has been hurt and taken into custody in Germany,” Karl reports Powell allegedly told Cohen, and the Pentagon “needs to launch a special operations mission to get her.”

Now, let us pause here to ponder a very necessary what the fk. The person who was helping Rudy Giuliani craft hoaxes worthy of tearing up the Constitution so that Republicans would not have to give up the White House to Joe Biden, the person who represented Trump ally Michael Flynn after Flynn got caught doing ridiculous crimes for ridiculous reasons, is somehow convinced that the director of the CIA was on a secret mission to Germany to personally retrieve an invisible elections-stealing server. But Oh No, Germany has captured her, and now the military has to send in a top special operations team to invade Germany and spring the CIA head from a German prison.

This is DONALD TRUMP’S DAMN FREAKING ELECTION-FRAUD-PROMOTING CRACKPOT LAWYER calling Cohen up in a panic. The person who also is telling courtrooms that, actually, Donald Trump’s election loss doesn’t count because allies of Joe Biden secretly defraudipated Republicans, while Arizona crackpots are claiming China’s been shipping in “bamboo”-tainted Biden ballots and anyone willing to say they saw a pizza get delivered to an elections office is being interviewed about well, could the pizza box be full of Biden ballots? And this is THE ACTUAL STUFF HAPPENING as justification for nullifying United States democracy.

“Cohen thought Powell sounded out of her mind, according to the book,” sez ABC News. Yeah, you think?

You know what might have been really damn helpful at the time? For anyone involved with “intelligence” or anything else in government to pipe up at the time when one of the people attempting to end our democracy is very possibly high on ‘shrooms and demanding military invasions of Germany. Jeebus Cracker von Basketcase, nobody thought this was worth mentioning throughout the entire attempted coup?

Really?

All of this should be a friendly reminder that fascism, in its most basic form, is an inherently batshit movement that doesn’t just promote conspiracy theories but revels in them as an excuse for whatever actions its in-power practitioners feel like doing at whatever point in time they feel like doing it. A fascist American government might claim that, actually, Iran is developing nuclear election fraud technology and needs to be invaded immediately—and will do it. A fascist American government might claim that Jewish Space Lasers are rewriting ballots from space, insist that non-fascist votes be thrown out as laser-based forgeries, and expel any elections officials who do not comply from office. None of it makes sense. That is what makes it fascism: A devotion to governing by conspiracy theories, led not by a nation’s intellectuals but by whoever can most successfully prod the public into believing absurd and dangerous things.

State Republicans have been furiously passing actual laws premised on the conspiracy theories Powell and Giuliani were spewing—conspiracy theories no less ridiculous than, “omg our CIA director has been captured in Germany while on a secret mission to retrieve a computer that made Trump lose.” It doesn’t matter to anyone whether they’re true or false, and they’re not going to give a damn when they learn that the person who flew in to testify about how elections were being stolen from them turns out to be, no surprise, a gullible crackpot who was grasping at whatever completely asinine bullshit happened to float by her eyeballs. It was all fake, from beginning to end.

Powell, though, appears to have actually believed that bullshit. As a defense against seditious conspiracy, that’s … probably a damn solid one, actually. Jeebus.