The next day, the campaign was reorganized around arranging TV bookings for Giuliani, Ellis, Epshteyn, Toensing, and diGenova, all to get out there and argue the steal.

A key sign of the situation pushing quickly to the outer edge of no return was that the crazies kept identifying people who were even crazier.

“Sidney Powell,” pronounced Giuliani, “is crazy.”

Powell, whom the president had drafted into the election challenge effort, and Rudy had a showdown early on the week of the sixteenth, with even Rudy, in frustration, questioning Powell’s most outlandish theories.

“I didn’t come here to kiss your fucking ring,” Powell said to the mayor. The two of them ended up in separate rooms sulking, with Ellis calling the president to moderate. The president made clear that he wanted Powell on the team. He was embracing everybody (or anybody) who agreed that the election had been stolen from him.

Powell, at sixty-five, had had quite a long and serious career, with ten years as an assistant U.S. attorney and then in private practice handling some big cases, including parts of the Enron defense. But along the way, there had been a drift into right-wing politics—or, perhaps more to the point, into right-wing media. Powell wrote and self-published a book about the Enron prosecution, Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice, which led to Fox News appearances. She added two and two together for other conspiracies and views of the deep state: Andrew Weissmann was the Enron prosecutor and, subsequently, Robert Mueller’s deputy in the investigation of the president. See? It was all connected! Ever- larger conspiracies earned her more Fox airtime.

The president noticed Powell on Fox, and called. So did Michael Flynn. Flynn was, briefly, Trump’s first national security advisor, bounced out in an FBI investigation in the first weeks of the administration. Represented by an established law firm, and pleading guilty, he would later fire the firm and hire Powell to try to reverse his plea. In Powell’s defense of Flynn, he was a victim of the worst deep-state abuses, a narrative that would be embraced by the president and the Trump Justice Department. Indeed, it would result, not long after Election Day, in Powell being fully signed on to the election fraud and recount team and, shortly, in Flynn’s pardon by the president.

Powell had moved beyond Flynn, into deeper new conspiracies. In the days immediately following the election, she was the author on Fox of operatic new conspiracies, going much further out than anything the president had yet reached: computer systems had been programmed to switch Trump votes to Biden votes, with the CIA in on it. Now she had been telling Giuliani and the team that the conspiracy ran even deeper: Trump’s landslide victory was upended by an international plot. Former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez (dead since 2013), George Soros, the Clinton Foundation, and the Chinese had masterminded the plot to steal the election from him. Oh, and the voting software routed the results though Germany, exposing the tabulation to nefarious elements there!