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Jan. 2, 2024 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:06
FORECAST 2024 Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep738
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Coming up, guys, a new year, a new podcast with a little bit of a new format.
And in my opening monologue, I'm going to talk a little bit about that and also a brief preview of what we can expect in this critical year of 2024.
I have an in-depth interview with an Emmy award-winning actress.
Her name is Martha Byrne.
And wait till you hear her story with her husband, Mike McMahon, the experience that they had being targeted, prosecuted by the US government, by the Eastern District of New York.
Just horrifying and a sign that there's a kind of a widespread breakdown in our justice system.
Hey, if you're watching on Rumble or listening on Apple, Google, or Spotify, please subscribe to the podcast to my channel.
this is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Guys, it's a new year and I am back.
Debbie and I are back.
The podcast is back.
We took a couple of weeks off and I want to thank Monica Crowley and Kyle Serafin for sitting in for me and doing a great job.
I've gotten some very good reaction on both those guys.
They're very different.
Monica is kind of old school and And in fact, she's telling Debbie, she's like, well, I like to print everything out.
And Debbie goes, that's exactly like you, Dinesh.
We're old school now. Debbie's actually not old school.
Debbie's, I sometimes call her a gadgeteer.
She loves new gadgets.
Usually there's something wrong with our computers and stuff.
It's like Debbie's on the case to get it sorted out.
And then Kyle, of course, is really tech-savvy, but he also brings just an interesting point of view.
As you know, in the past I've had Danielle, my daughter, or Brandon sit in for me.
They are preoccupied with their campaign.
This has become, well, it has to be an obsession, right?
Because... Welcome to my show!
Debbie has been kind of experienced with campaigns.
I'm really not.
But we're getting a little bit of a view as to all the different elements from door-to-door knocking to signs to billboards to radio ads and TV ads to going to events.
And it seems like Brandon and Danielle were going to a Christmas party every day for the past month, leading all the way Thank you.
Now, if you're listening to the podcast, everything may seem kind of the same, but if you're watching, you'll see that we've got a little different setup.
It's a different background, a little more casual, well, I think a little bit more of a podcast-y setup.
And The reason for this is that I've done three years of the podcast.
I have been part of the Salem Podcast Network.
In fact, I think I was maybe the first or maybe the second, I don't know, guy to be part of that network, which has now expanded considerably.
And for the first three years, our format was very much, well, I guess I'd call it a sort of a modified Fox News format, which is to say, The structure of it looked like I was a TV host and covering sort of segments on the news.
Each segment was typically around six minutes long.
And I tried to stay within that format and it worked reasonably well.
But it occurred to me that that's a little bit more of a format for a TV show.
And I began to feel the limitations of the format, really in two areas.
One is that there was a kind of unnatural break, if you will, sometimes between topics.
And so I would move on to the next topic, but I hadn't quite finished what I wanted to say in the previous topic.
So I thought, I need to find a way to have longer segments so I can go into something in more depth.
And also with the interviews, I felt a little bit like, you know, a TV host in which I'm interviewing someone and I've got this very tight format of six minutes or maybe two segments of six minutes and very often they've got a lot of ideas they want to get into, They've got a lot to say and I'm only able to give people a teaser, almost like a trailer of the full story that I want to bring out.
So I thought, no, let's adapt the format so I can do more in-depth interviews.
Talk to someone for 15, 20, maybe 30 minutes if need be.
And you'll find that that is the case today.
I've got a really interesting guest, Martha Byrne.
She's a three-time Emmy Award winning actress.
She was, what was it, honey?
As the World Turns.
She was Lily on As the World Turns now.
I wasn't really in the United States for all of this, so I... Well, oh, I was in the United States, but not a regular watcher of soap operas like Debbie.
So there you go.
But in any event, she's a lovely lady, and her husband, who is in law enforcement and then a PI, a private investigator, gets not just drawn into, but I would say targeted by the U.S. government.
This is the Eastern District of New York.
I've had some experience with the Southern District of New York, targeted in a just nefarious way.
And again, I think the nice thing about our new format is it allows me to go into it and she is able to really spell out what happened to her and the impact on her family.
Just truly terrifying.
Until it happens to you, you're sort of in disbelief.
This is going to be a big year, 2024, and with the election at the end of it, and the supreme efforts by the Democrats and by the left to Well, I'd have to say make it a non-election.
And I mean that sincerely.
They want to rig the playing field.
They want to stack the odds in their favor.
And they want to remove the leading candidate of the Republican Party from the ballot.
Wow. And they're doing this.
This is the chutzpah. Welcome to my show!
We're going to see things that none of us can fully anticipate now.
The level of insanity.
I don't mean dementia. I don't mean Biden-style dementia.
I mean the left completely losing it is going to reach a whole new level this year.
And our job, very simple, is to be ready for them.
As we head into a presidential election year, one thing you can be sure of, 2024 will be tumultuous.
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Guys, one of the subjects that we cover regularly on the podcast is the justice system, or in some cases it seems these days, injustice system.
And our focus is typically on politics, the ideological manipulation of the justice system.
But it seems like the problem is bigger than that.
It's wider than that.
I want to welcome for my guest today Martha Byrne.
She's a three-time Emmy Award winning actress.
She's probably best known for her role as the character Lily and then later her twin sister Rose on As the World Turns.
And she and her family got drawn into one of these cases.
It's really horrifying.
And you'll see in a moment how it turns your life upside down.
The case involves her husband, Mike McMahon, who spent his career as, well, he was in law enforcement and then he was a private investigator.
So let's bring on Martha Byrne.
By the way, you can follow her on X, Martha Byrne 10.
Also there's a website, pipehitterfoundation.org.
We'll get to that.
It's a foundation supporting the legal efforts of Martha and her husband and their family.
Martha, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
You know, Debbie has been an aficionado of television and following soap operas and stories over years and years.
And you are a known person in so many people's homes over such a long period of time.
And yet, here you are suddenly drawn into this bizarre legal situation, which has been, I mean, you used the word a moment ago, just hell on your family.
Maybe I could just start by asking you to just comment on the fact that when someone does not have exposure to the legal system...
You have a kind of civics book faith in it.
You're like, the good guys are going to come out okay, policemen are going to kind of apprehend the bad guys, judges are there to make sure everything is on the up and up, juries of course are there to provide the kind of common man's wisdom in the situation, and then when you're in the system somehow, you discover it's Totally different than that.
Can you talk a little bit about just the surrealism of the case that you've been living with now for, what, three, four, five years?
It's been three years.
I think that my husband took the NYPD test when he was 16.
He had 78 Medals of Honor while he was on the NYPD. He became a private investigator, one of the most sought-after private investigators in the tri-state area.
worked for the federal government on federal cases, high profile cases.
He's never done anything wrong in his life. Like when we first met, I'd said, how are you so perfect? And I know, I mean, that sounds like a broad stroke comment, but it is true. Like the man has lived his life, saving lives and protecting others and of honesty. And on the NYPD, you know, there's a high standard of investigations and protocols. And I found that when you're in the system of the federal system, that that doesn't seem to be
the same protocols and the same standards that are kept to regarding investigations.
You know, we knew that he had done nothing wrong.
He's worked on thousands of cases.
This was a routine case where he got called by an American company business in Queens to do some background checks, asset searches.
very routine case, hired two NYPD retired detectives who also were PIs, spoke to two federal agents about the case. This is 2016. So you got to remember what we're talking about, 2016.
Never thought about it again, worked five days, made notifications to local police department doing surveillance. He did invoices. He did everything right. He did more than right, right? He did above and beyond. And he never thought about it again. And then four years later, the FBI is at our door saying that he was violating FARA, which I'm sure you're hearing a little bit more about now, Foreign Agents Registration Act, and interstate stalking, which is ridiculous because PIs do that.
They surveil. I mean, news organizations surveil.
Insurance companies surveil.
You know, he notified the local police.
That's like telling the police that you're going to go rob a bank the week before, right?
What day are you going to be there in this time?
It makes no sense that he was armed.
That he was retired in YPD. He went into the police, local police, and told them about it.
So there was nothing about this.
We thought this must be a horrible mistake.
They must have gotten the wrong guy.
So he freely spoke to the FBI when they arrested him.
They never told him what he was charged with until after he spoke to them, which is really disturbing.
Because if they had told me he was charged with interest in stalking, he would have laughed because it's ridiculous.
He would never do anything illegal.
He doesn't break the law.
So what happens in the federal system, I think the takeaway, there's so much to take away, but I have to say something.
The lengths that they will go to to prevent Evidence that is beneficial to you is astonishing.
You would think that if you're charged with being a foreign agent, betraying our country after what he's lived his life to do, you should be able to present any piece of evidence that exonerates you.
And we were prevented from talking about his career as NYPD. We were prevented to talk about a civil lawsuit against the subject that he was surveilling who had been served on his property a few months after my husband's surveillance.
We couldn't talk about the China Initiative, which I'd like to talk about a little bit more.
We're not allowed to show his entire interrogation video, which exonerated him.
They only showed like two minutes of it or three minutes of it, which of course, after talking to them for an hour and a half, they pull out what they want to make him look bad.
And 99.9% of it, it shows that he was obviously targeted and used.
But I have to tell you something.
What's so disturbing about this case is that what he did is not illegal.
There was no crime.
Zero. Absolutely no crime.
So to create something and create a case, because he's an American citizen, I guess, I don't know, he's the only American citizen charged in this case, his history is good for clicks, it's good for a press conference, you know, is shocking.
But I have to say something else.
When you have the head of the FBI doing a press conference in front of the world saying that these people were behaving like an organized crime syndicate and they knew this for years?
And they didn't protect my family.
They didn't use the NYPD guys or the two federal agents involved in this case as assets.
They never spoke to them, the FBI, over four years of their investigation.
But they spoke to the Chinese agents who lied to them over and over again.
And it all came out in court.
You know, their witnesses. Everybody lied in this case except my husband.
He's the only person who told the truth.
And he's being punished the most for it.
It is so wrong what has happened in this situation.
But if you can arrest a PI for doing surveillance, background checks, you can arrest a plumber for changing a pipe.
That's what I say. That's the analogy.
It's like, so many people use background checks, surveillance.
It is legal. Parking on a public street, if this case sticks...
It now could be a federal crime if you park on a public street.
How scary is that?
You know, there's so much about this that is truly shocking, but I'm gravely disappointed in the Justice Department.
I am horrified. Watching what they did to my husband every day in court, I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, stop lying every day, because they just continued to promise all these things were going to come to fruition, and they were going to provide witnesses about their accusations, and they never did. At the end of the trial, they never did, and the jurors were sleeping a lot of the time.
One of the jurors got CCP propaganda put on their door on day two of double liberations.
I mean, I'm overwhelmed by how wrong this was.
You teach your children.
To be honest, tell the truth, do the right thing.
And then the people who are supposed to, as our highest regard for truth and justice, are fabricating information and making things up to get the W. And I find that to be wrong.
And look, you and I, we all know people who work in the federal system.
I know FBI, former current federal agents, you know, people who work in U.S. attorneys, for U.S. attorneys.
We can't lump all of them into the bad people.
But what happens is if there's no accountability for the ones who do these things, then what kind of message are you sending to the rookies, the new people, the freshman U.S. attorneys who are in the courtroom?
I wanted to say this is not how it's supposed to work.
If the guy's innocent, get him out.
If he's not guilty of anything, stop.
But protect our family, bottom line.
I mean, I spoke to Richard Grinnell in D.C. when I was down there last year, and he said our family should have been given a defense briefing, especially the U.S. law enforcement connected to this case, you know?
And they didn't do that.
They never spoke to them until after Mike's arrest.
None of them. It's really disheartening and upsetting on so many levels.
But, you know, the fact that my family was potentially put in danger, I mean, what if they came to my house?
They had my address?
We were followed after?
It's so disturbing that this is how they treat a hero?
Who has sacrificed everything for this country?
Who put his life on the line?
For his whole career?
And they knew that?
They know he's innocent, right?
They know. They've seen it.
They know he was used.
He found assets.
They didn't ask him to do anything illegal.
They wanted to know how many houses the guy owned, how many cars, how many LLCs, all this stuff that he had.
And they used that information to sue him stivily a few months later.
So... They never asked my husband.
He would never do anything illegal.
But here we are.
We'll be right back with Martha Byrne in a moment.
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I'm back with three-time Emmy award-winning actress, writer and producer Martha Byrne.
You can follow her on X, Martha Byrne10.
And we're talking about this remarkable case involving her husband, Mike McMahon.
Martha, let's back up to sort of the beginning of all this.
There are some bad guys, it seems, involved in this enterprise, and it seems to be related to a kind of a nefarious Chinese operation, these so-called Chinese police stations, in which Chinese guys maintain a certain type of control over Chinese nationals, perhaps, living in the United States.
Now, your husband is not part of any of this.
He was hired, as you say, by an American company, given a project, a task.
And instead of going after the bad guys, they go after your husband.
So let's go into the detail of this, because what was the actual bad stuff that was going on that your husband had no inkling of?
So there's two lanes to this case.
There's a civil case, which is what my husband was asked to do, which was nothing illegal.
And there was a criminal lane.
So in the criminal lane, they were trying to repatriate someone who was here, someone who had fled China.
He had stolen millions of dollars from a construction company in China, and he was laundering the money here.
And they were trying to get him to go back to face that crime, I imagine.
I... Apparently, they left a threatening note on his door 18 months after my husband had finished his surveillance, and they charged my husband with that.
So they kind of lumped everything into the same crime, but that's not what was going on.
You know, they were knocking on doors.
I have to say something. There was another case in the Southern District of New York.
This case was in the Eastern District.
And in the Southern District of New York, there were multiple private investigators.
There were multiple targets, Chinese targets.
So they were knocking on doors, taking pictures.
They never charged any of the private investigators in that case.
So the repatriations and the MSS officers, which is the Chinese police, they were here under their own names in 2016.
You know, they were taking classes in Houston, they were in Connecticut, like the government knew they were here, but they were going off and doing these operations unbeknownst to the government, obviously, which, okay.
But my husband was also just asked to do, again, a civil matter.
So here's what's...
The man was on the Interpol's most wanted list for embezzlement and bribes, I believe.
And so that matched up to what my husband was asked for.
Oh, he stole money. Okay, I will find the money.
So there's a lot of things and moving pieces that he had nothing to do with.
Absolutely nothing. So it seems that what's going on, at least from what I can figure, is that the US government lets in these Chinese guys into the country.
They know about it, and they've given them permission to be here.
But apparently, unknown to them, these Chinese guys are also acting as agents of the Chinese police or the Chinese government.
They're like, let's grab this Chinese guy and take him back to the mainland.
So the government should be looking at that and perhaps prosecuting that.
But it seems like almost to cover up for their failure to do that because these Chinese guys seem to slip the net.
They seem to go back to China.
As you say, in one case, the guy was interviewed at the airport and then they let him go.
And instead, they zoom into your...
claim he was a foreign agent because ultimately he was hired by guys who had these nefarious objectives or at least were participating in these nefarious activities. So here's my question, I think for anyone trying to follow all this and it is a little complicated. Do you think that the the motive here is that you've got a US government or an agency of the government that is
embarrassed at their kind of failure to be able to apprehend this Chinese operation that's going on under our noses?
and they go, well, we got to get somebody that shows that we are doing our job and therefore your husband and your family was sort of the unfortunate target of choice to vindicate what otherwise is a failure of responsibility.
I mean, you must have thought about, like, why are they doing this?
Why do you think they're doing it?
I think you hit it right on the head.
I think, you know, you used the word embarrassed.
It was actually a video played at our trial where the FBI agent is speaking to the Chinese agent who lies to him, right?
But they know he's involved in some way and something that just happened.
And he thanks them. The FBI agent thanks him for talking not to embarrass the government.
So... But then he came back and they interviewed him again and he told them what was going on.
Look, they know, they knew that they were using private investigators in these operations.
The fact that the FBI didn't call my husband in April of 2017 when they had his phone, they had his information, right, to debrief him on what just happened.
Is shocking, right?
I mean, crimes would have been prevented if they had talked to him and the other US law enforcement here.
But I think you're right. The main players, they had pictures of these guys.
They had a pyramid of pictures of all these horrible Chinese operatives, right, who were here, who were gone.
And then my husband's picture in there.
He knows who these people are.
The government knew who they were because they told them.
They had it listed on their visas who they were here to see, what they were to, where they were going.
So I'm sorry.
You don't get to send a message to China on my family's back.
I'm sorry. You don't get to put my family in danger because you didn't do your job to bring them in.
Do you realize that my husband spoke to an active agent back, I guess, a year and a half ago, we happened to see at a soccer game that he grew up with and he hadn't seen him and he filled him in and the agent's like, oh my gosh, I would have loved abused you and brought you in and I would never have arrested you. So there's there's there's FBI agents who were tasked to do certain things.
And with the China Initiative, I've been doing a lot of research on it.
There was supposed to be an agent in every state who was supposed to be educating, helping, you know, getting the word out.
And I don't know what was going on in New Jersey, but I'm telling you right now, after my husband was arrested...
I went to local law enforcement.
I was speaking to private investigative agencies.
I reached out to everybody to let them know what was going on.
You know what? They had never heard from the FBI. They had invited the FBI to come talk, and they never would come.
So there was a missed opportunity here to catch these guys if they had just put an alert out to PIs, local law enforcement.
The fact that they don't tell local law enforcement in these New Jersey towns that these are happening, these operations...
You're putting people's safety at risk by not doing that.
And we wouldn't be talking today if they had done that because my husband didn't make notifications.
So I'm sorry.
You know, sending a message to China, they didn't get the message because we just had a parade for Xi Jinping in San Francisco where you had our military holding Chinese flags.
You have to do boots on the ground.
You have to do local law enforcement.
You have to utilize PIs and not punish them.
That's not right. And they knew that they were using PIs, but they didn't do anything about it.
I mean, I want to push this a little further, Martha, because I want to go in a little more insidious direction than even you are, because I think that your assumption is that the federal government here wants to get the bad guys, and they're being horribly negligent because your family and your husband is doing his job, he's kind of going about his business, and this is just a failure of competence on their part.
But one thing we've seen, and we've seen this particularly in the war on terror, is that the government does not hesitate to implicate people when they want to get them.
In other words, they don't hesitate, for example, to find, let's just say, for example, a guy on a campus who is some kind of a radical, maybe, doesn't like the US government, maybe doesn't like Israel, but is not a terrorist.
And they'll say to this guy, have you thought of joining Al-Qaeda or ISIS?
In other words, they have an informant who sort of plants this idea in the guy's head.
And the guy goes, no, man, I'm not gonna join ISIS.
But then they go, well, you know what?
There's a training camp in Pakistan.
And the guy goes, well, I don't have a passport.
I don't have any money.
And the government then goes, well, how about if we get you a passport?
How about if we give you the money?
What I'm getting at is their objective here is to demonstrate that terrorism is on the rise and they are brilliantly cracking down on it.
And they're not above going after people that they know are innocent.
And by innocent, I mean this guy may be a radical, but he's not a terrorist.
You're drawing him into a scheme that he otherwise would not have been part of.
So when you say things to me like, you know, they knew my husband was innocent.
It immediately sets off an alarm bell in my mind because it tells me, well, I wonder if this is part of their way.
See, if they grab some Chinese guy, A, those guys are harder to get because they flee the country.
Whereas your husband is a high-profile target in the country.
And so it makes them...
Look good. It satisfies their ambition.
And what's disturbing to me is that I've seen this happen in the ideological area, but it now seems to be spreading out into normal life.
And it's hitting a lot of people like your family where your husband is like a genuine American hero.
He's a good guy. Absolutely.
And so they're making a good guy into a bad guy.
I mean, what does that feel like for you and for your family?
I think it's disgusting.
I think it is truly, you know, they could not find one bad thing about my husband.
They looked, they were trying so hard, you know, they really tried to paint him as an unlawful person, taking legal PI work and trying to make it look nefarious, and it wasn't.
You know, you have a jury who doesn't understand what private investigators do.
And as much as you try to hammer that in, it's that they're going to paint you as a horrible person.
And it's absolutely wrong.
And you brought up entrapment.
And we address that because why are they talking to Chinese agents who are willingly talking to them, who are lying to them most of the time, right?
Right. They're working with them, but they're not working with U.S. law enforcement.
Make that make sense.
You know, they had one of the witnesses who lied to the FBI many times.
I think he said they interviewed him 10 times or something like that.
It's like, so you're spending multi-millions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to go down a rabbit hole of people that don't...
We care about our country, who are not patriots like my husband, who have dedicated their lives to the betterment of others, and you're discarding them.
You know, it's wrong, and there needs to be change.
You know, I've tried very hard to find out, like, what was the protocol when a U.S. member of law enforcement, two federal agents, by the way, who have security clearance, who are involved, who are never spoken to, Is that a protocol?
Or there was actually two people who my husband worked with in the same office as the case agent in this case.
So you're going to tell me for four years that they were investigating my husband?
They couldn't buy the water cooler?
Talk to these guys?
I'm assuming they didn't because he worked with them in the NYPD at some point.
If you just ignore the fact that the truth is on the left over here and you just pretend it's not there, it doesn't make it untrue.
It just makes the fact that you're not looking at it because you don't want to know the answer when you're deliberately ignoring the truth.
It is. That is so wrong.
That's why when I say I've spoken to people who have worked in the U.S.
government who are wonderful people.
You know, the China Initiative did wonderful things that was doing great work, but this is not what it was supposed to be.
And the fact that we couldn't talk about it at trial, and the fact that it was apparently a failure in some regard, it's not my fault.
It's not our family's fault that that was the case.
You know, if you're not utilizing your assets, These guys are assets.
These NYPD guys, these two federal agents, they were assets to us.
And to not use them.
And these people have put their lives on the line for our country and would die for our country.
My husband's almost died for this country numerous times between the police shootouts and everything else that he's done in his career.
And to have that totally disregarded to me as his wife...
As his father of my children to see what they've done to him is a disgrace.
It is a disgrace.
But I also have to believe that in the end, there's people out there who know that.
They know the truth and they're going to speak up and they're going to help us make sure this is right.
And the judge is now looking at motions to overturn this case.
We had... Ample amounts of evidence that they didn't prove their case.
And I really pray that she writes this wrong.
Because if we're going to build back trust in the justice system, if we're going to have people out there in the world to believe that the good guys win in the end because they're the right ones, they're the ones doing the good things, they have to fix this.
And we will help fix it in the long run, too.
We will help other people.
We will help maybe build more protocols and Work with the government to educate.
The fact that they don't know that PIs are being used or they didn't share it, that's bad right out of the gate.
We'll be right back for a final segment with Martha Byrne.
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I'm back with three-time Emmy Award-winning actress Martha Byrne.
We're talking about this outrageous case involving her husband, Mike McMahon.
Martha, let's talk about the trial itself because, you know, you can have an ambitious prosecutor.
You could even have some corrupt or unscrupulous FBI agents.
But We always have the expectation that when you put it in court, there's cross-examination.
There are two sides as a judge.
The judge's job is to make sure that the whole process is fair.
The jury is there to listen attentively to what the facts are and try to make...
You hinted at this earlier.
I mean, when you're dealing with a judge excluding exculpatory evidence, a jury that there's a guy dozing while the case is being talked about, more than one.
I mean, is it the case that our juries are just not capable of sifting through?
Or is it the case that the prosecutors have so much of an advantage because they, you know, you gave one example, they put a bunch of nefarious Chinese guys up there, throw your husband's picture into the middle of that mix and the jury goes, whoa, he's obviously one of the bad guys.
I want you to talk a little bit as someone who went through this and sat there and watched What's happening in the courtroom that justice becomes so skewed?
I think that I have to give the judge, you know, when that happened with his picture, we made an objection to his picture being there, and the judge agreed and moved his picture to the bottom of the triangle, you know.
And I also learned that the prosecutors are given as much as they are needed to be given to prove their case, right?
So the judge's job is to weigh the balance of giving the prosecutors what they need to prove their case.
It's not enough. But...
When you're talking about defending your life and you can't tell the jury that this guy, he would never in a million years betray his country and he walked away with a few thousand dollars on this case.
That's wrong.
And I learned way too much about how the prosecution can get away with so much.
And I'm, again, shocked that they would work so hard to paint my husband as a criminal when they know he's not.
I find that to be the antithesis of what our justice system is supposed to be.
And I, with the jury sleeping, you know, I counted one day, it was 28 minutes, one of the jurors was asleep.
One of the jurors pulled their hoodie down once and was putting their head down and sleeping.
And I wanted to scream, like, this is our life we're talking about here.
And they're not paying attention.
And I feel like, you know, no agents who worked on this case testify.
Not one. Nobody.
Nobody. So that we couldn't cross-examine them.
I just want people to understand that.
So the people who actually worked four years on investigating this case, who stood by it as one of the biggest foxhunt pace operations, you know, this huge case, nobody who worked on it testified.
None! So we couldn't cross-examine them about it.
How wrong is that? Like, if this is your case, you should have to take the stand so we can actually ask you questions.
Why did you let the guy flee the country?
Why didn't you come to Mike McMahon and the other law enforcement and bring them in?
Did you go to the local police and ask about who had been there?
Like, we couldn't do that.
And I feel like that needs to change.
There's a couple of things. Again, I'm not pie-in-the-sky person, like, ooh, I'm going to fix everything.
But here's the bottom line. You should be able to present a defense in everything possible.
And the fact that you can present statements from people because they're not here, okay.
But this is not, you're up against it.
You know, there's a statistic that 90% of people who get charged with a federal crime take a plea deal.
90%. 8% get a drop before trial and 2% go to trial.
2% people go to trial.
Of that 2%, the prosecution wins 99.5% of the time.
Now I know why. Now I understand.
But it doesn't make it right.
Well, I mean, it's not justice in any recognizable sense of the term.
That's the point I think we're trying to convey.
I mean, let's set the motive for this.
I mean, you have a successful family.
Your husband, after he retired and became a PI, you live in a really nice home.
and the government is in effect saying that in a case, as you say a routine case, doing some surveillance and so on in an apparently civil matter where your husband is paid nineteen thousand dollars or roughly nineteen thousand dollars, he's hired a couple of PIs so he ends up paying them so that his net is considerably less than nineteen thousand dollars that in effect he was willing to sell out his country
and work as an agent of a foreign government, quote, for money.
Now, if I was on that jury, I would go, this is ridiculous, right?
This is on the face of it absurd.
But you're saying that, so what intrigues me is they're able to pull it off, you're saying, because they don't even go into the actual facts of the case that would enable the jury to see this makes absolutely no sense.
If your husband was being paid $8 million under the table or something, then he'd be like, oh, maybe.
But nobody would put their...
And I'm assuming that the legal cost of this case, the emotional cost of it, the effect on your...
Let's talk about that because I think it helps to show that they are willing to really destroy an all-American family Under the claim that your husband made, what, 10,000 bucks?
He actually made about $6,000 walking away.
And I really upset Steve.
They're like, he did it for money. I'm sorry.
I worked for 35 years in the entertainment business.
I was semi-retired.
We owned our house. We had no mortgage.
We had no debt. We had no credit card debt.
We had money in the bank.
He was semi-retired because he had been injured on the job at the police chase.
And he did PI work because he really loved it.
He did so much pro bono work as a PI. He did that all the time.
So there was no financial motive whatsoever.
So... It...
but... but...
They knew that, right?
They know that, and they have nothing else to make him look...
They have no motive. There was no motive, period.
But to bankrupt us, you know, these cases cost about a million dollars on...
If you're going to fight the government, you better have a million dollars in the bank, okay, to be able to fight back against this.
This is why a lot of people take plea deals.
The pressure from the government, wow, they play dirty with you, you know, and it's so...
You know, they send voluminous...
A discovery to your attorney that's $1,200, $1,500, $1,600, $1,700 an hour.
So you have to read it at your lawyer's office like you can't take it home.
They want to bankrupt you.
They want to break you financially, emotionally, spiritually.
They want you to cave.
And from day one, he said, I will never take a plea deal.
I did nothing wrong.
I broke no law.
I will fight this and I was right there beside him.
I said, I don't care.
I will do anything to help you.
We will figure it out and our lawyers are incredible and amazing and they trust him and know he's a great guy because he's worked for some of the top attorneys in the country, honey, and they know how much integrity he has and they're willing to help us and work with us.
But that's not like every American.
We're very fortunate to have people like you who haven't let me come on and talk about this.
Do you know how many people have contacted me who are broken emotionally, who have been totally railroaded and are asking for my support emotionally to help them?
And I will help. But that's...
We can do better. We need to do better.
This is not how it should be.
And I... We'll get through this.
It's been three years.
My kids are amazing, and they love their father, and they know he's a hero, but to have them sit in court, my boys sit in court, and listen to what they did to their father, they wanted to come.
They wanted to see. I said, you need to see the people that did this to your family.
If you want to go see them, come on in.
You won't believe it. You're going to be shocked at what they say and how they get away with it.
It's dirty.
It feels dirty.
And we've lived our lives of integrity.
I am a person who loves this country.
We come from law enforcement, firemen, military, first responders.
My husband has nine brothers and sisters.
Their whole entire family and multi-generational dedication to this country.
So we know that there's so much good, but there has to be accountability for those who do not Do the right thing.
Or else this will continue.
So I hope we're talking about the other end of this soon.
And I've talked to D.C. I've talked to congressmen.
I have been screaming from the mountaintops.
I'll tell you, there's been some congressmen who have been fantastic with me.
And I can't wait to support their re-election when it happens.
Because there's some wonderful people out there who have helped us.
Well, thank you, Martha, for sharing your story.
I got to say, just in wrapping it up, that there's a question here of whether we have an abuse of the system, a breakdown of the system, or do we have a system itself that is in need of fundamental reform?
I mean, I have come around very much to the latter view, that the system itself creates these kinds of injustices, because you just described a process that is punishment in and of itself.
If they send you 800 questions to answer, you then have to pay a lawyer $500 an hour to answer those questions.
Then they send you 800 more questions.
They're ruining your family.
And that's before you've even gone to trial.
That's before the process has really even started.
So there's something very pernicious about it.
Because remember, the people that are doing it, They know they're doing it.
They're very conscious of what's happening.
They see it.
They see the ruinous effect of what they're doing, and yet they do it anyway.
And it seems to me that therein is the problem.
Well, I think more people need to hear about cases like this because it alerts them to the serious problem we have in the country.
I want to mention the PipeHitter Foundation.
PipeHitterFoundation.org.
And there's a section on Michael McMahon.
So learn more about the case, guys.
And Martha Byrne, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me, my family.
We all appreciate it because we can do this together, right?
We are stronger together and we can create change.
And don't ever tell me one person can't make a difference because I was on St.
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
I have been involved with the hospital since I was a child and Danny Thomas changed the world and that was one man.
And I really follow his mission of giving back and changing what you can with the power that you have.
So, thank you. Subscribe to the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast on Apple, Google, and Spotify.
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