A lawyer who spearheaded Trumpworld efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election win tried to instigate a “special operations mission” in Germany as part of her bid to peddle the lie that Donald Trump was the real winner, a new book claims. Sidney Powell, a former lawyer to Michael Flynn who advised Donald Trump on his efforts to retain power, contacted a Pentagon official weeks after the election to push the bizarre claim that the then-CIA director was being held captive in Germany, according to the new Jonathan Karl book Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show.

“Gina Haspel has been hurt and taken into custody in Germany,” the book quotes Powell telling Ezra Cohen, a senior intelligence official. “You need to launch a special operations mission to get her,” Powell reportedly said, claiming that Haspel had somehow been injured during a deep state mission to get an election-related server that would prove the votes had been rigged. “They needed to get the server and force Haspel to confess,” Karl writes of Powell’s claims. Her call to Cohen reportedly came after a similar overture by former national security adviser Michael Flynn, another QAnon supporter who demanded that Cohen return from an overseas trip because “big things” were about to happen. “As Flynn ranted about the election fight, [Cohen] felt his old boss sounded manic,” the book notes.