Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

You only get about one page into Jeanine Pirro’s new book, Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy, before she calls herself an idiot. It’s not entirely clear whether she meant to do it or if she just got lost in the rapture of the prose, but she definitely calls herself an idiot. “We know what the liberal media think of Trump voters: They’re deplorables, idiots, rednecks, and people who cling to God, guns, and religion,” Pirro writes. “To those charges, I plead guilty--guilty and proud!”

It’s confusing, and you’re left wondering why Pirro seemingly went out of her way to make herself look stupid. But intentional or not, it serves as an apt table-setter for the rest of the book, in which the Fox News host inflicts upon the reader a frenetic conspiracy theory that absolutely obliterates all logic and does violence upon the very notion of observable truth, and effectively discredits herself by painstakingly demonstrating that she is committed solely to the mission of kissing the ass of her friend, President Donald Trump.

To be honest, I’m not entirely confident that anything I could write about this book (which is currently number one on the Amazon bestseller list) would be more damning of the author than the poison-laced nonsense she herself has committed to paper. The book’s conceit is that there exists an “anti-Trump conspiracy” to “nullify the decision of the American people and continue the globalist, open-border oligarchy that the people voted to dismantle in 2016.” The culprits she identifies “include, but are not limited to, the leadership at the FBI, the CIA, NSA, and other intelligence agencies, the Democrat (sic) Party, and perhaps even the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts. And let’s not forget the media and entertainment industries that are waging a nonstop propaganda campaign that would render envious their counterparts in the worst totalitarian states of history.”

Hoo boy. Pirro, like literally every other conspiracy theorist on the planet, starts at the conclusion and then sets about backfilling her outlandish assertions. And, also like every other conspiracy theorist, her overriding zeal leads her to contradict herself and make a series of embarrassing fuck-ups.

Let’s start with her treatment of the Justice Department investigation into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia, which is hampered by Pirro’s howling ignorance. Pirro argues that it was former CIA Director John Brennan who “started the whole phony Russian collusion investigation” with the help of the dossier written by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele and “pressured the FBI into investigating the Trump campaign.” But she also writes, confusingly, that Brennan “tried to get the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign, but [former FBI Director James] Comey turned a deaf ear” and would not “buy the crap Brennan was selling.”

She continues, writing that Brennan “cornered” former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid “and spewed his cooked-up tale about Putin and Trump,” and Reid “sent a letter posthaste off to the FBI director, urging him to open an investigation. Cardinal Comey didn’t open one, at least that the public knew about.” So by her own reckoning, Brennan did an extremely poor job of starting the Russia investigation she alleges he started. And the reason Comey did not start an investigation after Reid contacted him is because the investigation was already open at that point.

To confuse things even further, Pirro writes later in the book that Comey was “too busy trying to concoct a Russia collusion case” to properly run the FBI. So was it Brennan or Comey who supposedly invented this collusion lie? And wasn’t it Comey who was supposed to have summarily rejected Brennan’s “crap” about Trump and Russia? What the hell is going on here?

It gets still more baffling. She writes at one point that Barack Obama was “so desperate to keep Donald Trump from being elected that his Justice Department, prodded by his CIA chief John O. Brennan, misled the most secret court of the United States. The goal was simple: spy on the Trump campaign to undermine a presidential election.” But just a few paragraphs later she writes that Obama “knew all along what Russia was up to. He didn’t do anything because he, and the establishment pollsters, thought Hillary would win.” So Obama was both “desperate” and complacent, determined to undermine Trump but also content to do nothing about Russian efforts to help Trump because he thought Hillary was a lock.

Pirro’s book transitions from factless absurdity to disgraceful hypocrisy in its treatment of sexual misconduct by the powerful and wealthy. A section of her book is devoted to the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse story as the “perfect example of Hollywood hypocrisy.” Pirro writes that Weinstein “silenced those around him with his ability to intimidate victims, pressure business associates, buy powerful Democrats, and leverage hungry Hollywood actors.” She viciously attacks people she argues enabled Weinstein, like Hillary Clinton and actor Meryl Streep, accusing them of turning a blind eye to Weinstein’s abuses in exchange for money and power. “I have a particular animus for Harvey Weinstein and people of his ilk,” she writes.

The problem here is obvious: Pirro’s book is a rabid defense of Donald Trump, the most powerful alleged sexual assaulter on the planet. As I wrote in my profile of Pirro, she has enthusiastically set fire to her reputation as a crusading champion of sexual assault victims in order to shill for Trump, and this book is an especially disgusting expression of her moral self-immolation. While lashing out at Hollywood and Democrats for their “hypocrisy” over Weinstein, she comes nowhere close to addressing the many allegations of sexual assault leveled against Trump over the years. Instead, she writes: “It bothers me that the president has become such a target of LIBERALS for his treatment of women.”

There’s no great mystery to why Pirro runs interference for Trump’s sexual misconduct in this way: The president is her friend, and her proximity to him gives her power and influence. Pirro was granted access to the highest echelons of Trump’s world for this preposterous farce of a book. It features quotes from interviews Pirro conducted with senior Trump officials like Kellyanne Conway and White House chief of staff John Kelly. The text is peppered with quotes from Trump’s children, which alternate between the sad (“You think that there’s anyone on earth that could change DJT?” says Donald Trump Jr., referring to his father by his initials for some reason) and the comically self-unaware (“You have certain individuals from the mainstream media, who sit in their ivory towers, their fancy offices and multi-million-dollar apartments,” says Eric Trump, who owns a $2 million apartment overlooking Central Park).

She goes on at exhausting length about how she and Trump are great personal friends and have shared so many special memories together flying to and from Florida on the president’s private jet. These treacly stories are presumably intended to convey a warmer, more personable side to Trump, but really they just make it clear how compromised Pirro is by her relationship to the president.

Liars, Leakers, and Liberals stands as an unintended self-indictment of the author: She tries to prosecute the president’s critics as slavish defenders of the entrenched power structure, but in the process she enthusiastically outs herself as an unprincipled, untrustworthy, and thoroughly rotten vassal of the president’s. Pirro is the embodiment of the media corruption she rails against.

And if she wants to call herself an “idiot,” well, there’s no reason to object to that either.