Martha Byrne exposes the case of retired NYPD Sergeant Michael McMahon, a 78-medal veteran wrongfully jailed for 18 months under FARA and stalking charges tied to a 2016–2017 PI job investigating a Chinese embezzler—despite no foreign ties or victims. She alleges DOJ collusion with China’s Operation Fox Hunt, suppressed exculpatory evidence, and a trial blocking defense arguments about political persecution, calling it a "January 6-style" injustice where a decorated cop was silenced while real criminals escaped. McMahon’s prosecution, she claims, stems from exposing CCP surveillance in the U.S., with Byrne linking her own legal battles—including refusing to perjure herself against Trump—to the same pattern of weaponized justice. [Automatically generated summary]
Listen to this podcast now on the Red Apple Podcast Network, The Leadership Thread with Dr. Peggy Polonis.
I'm Dr. Peggy Polonis.
Join me on each episode where I unravel the story that shaped leaders, tracing the thread that led them where they are today.
Because leadership isn't born in adulthood.
Thank you once again for joining us on the leadership thread, education, ethics, and sustainability.
Download all of Red Apple Media's podcasts right now through your favorite podcast platform.
The Stone Zone.
Entertaining and informative on the Red Apple Podcast Network.
Michael McMahon is a distinguished and decorated New York City police sergeant, now retired, who served New Yorkers with honor during some of the most dangerous years of crime in America's largest city.
After retiring from the department, he continued to serve through honest work as a private investigator in New Jersey.
He was subsequently charged with a crime.
His alleged crime was nothing more than accepting an assignment that involved surveillance for clients he had no reason to believe were connected to a sinister operation by the Chinese Communist Party known as Operation Fox Hunt.
So what did Michael McMahon do?
He took photographs, he observed movements, he performed perfectly lawful investigative work that private investigators across America perform every single day.
Yet the U.S. Department of Justice under Joe Biden twisted these routine tasks into a theatrical display of espionage and conspiracy.
They smeared him as if he was the one who was an enemy of the state and they railroaded him into a false conviction.
They sent Michael McMahon, a good and decent man, to prison while the true traitors of our republic walk free.
Now at the center of this fight for an innocent man's rights stands his wife, actress, and author Martha Byrne.
She has shown courage that can only be described as incandescent.
She has written, spoken, and now documented this horrific story in her book, In Interests of Justice, which exposes the corruption and cruelty of the system.
And Martha Byrne joins us now in the Stone Zone.
Martha, welcome.
Thank you, Roger, for that introduction.
I greatly appreciate you having me on.
It's an honor to talk to you, sir.
Truly is.
Now, if you saw Martha Byrne, you would definitely recognize her.
She is an actress, well known for her role in the soap opera As the World Turns, where she played the role of Lily, then Twin Sister Rose, for which she won the lead actress Emmy.
After leaving As the World Turns, Martha starred on General Hospital, Crisis, wrote for the soap opera Bold and Beautiful, and she executive produced several award-winning and Emmy-nominated digital productions.
But she joins us today not as an actress or a professional, but she joins us as a wife and a mother.
She is married for over 30 years, 32 years, I believe, to retired New York Police Department Sergeant Michael McMahon.
They have three children, Michael, Max, and Anne-Marie.
And Michael, Max, and Anne-Marie need their father home with them.
So, Martha, tell us this story.
That's such a beautiful setup.
Thank you.
I'm honored to talk to you.
I met Mike when we were kids, and I was on As the World Turns, and he was this hero cop.
Shocking NYPD Case00:15:37
He was an NYPD detective during the 90s, you know, with the street crime unit.
He was one of the elite chosen.
You remember when Rudy Giuliani cleaned up in New York City?
Well, guess what?
My husband was right there at the front lines doing it, plain clothes, and earned 78 medals while he was on the NYPD.
He became a school safety sergeant.
He was incredible, had an incredible career.
And then he actually got the combat cross, which is for a gang-related shooting in the Bronx from Rudy Giuliani.
Put it on his neck at one police plaza and had an incredible career and had a severe car accident during a police chase in the Bronx and hit a telephone pole at 50 miles an hour, which ended his career.
And he was devastated.
I mean, he loved the job.
He really did.
He was a cops cop.
And when he left, he retired from the NYPD.
I was working full-time and he was with the children, but I could see that he really missed the job.
And he started working part-time as a private investigator and he really enjoyed it.
And his business took off and he was having, you know, doing some great jobs.
And then in 2016, he got a routine phone call from a New York-based company in the fall of 16.
The client wanted to find someone who had apparently stolen money, millions of dollars from a family construction business.
The construction business was in China, but the man had fled to the United States apparently and stolen all this money.
And the client wanted to, you know, where's the money?
And so my husband hired two NYPD retired detectives to work with him on this case and did basic work, you know, public records, found out the man had millions of dollars in real estate, LLCs, cars, there was the money, right?
And he did some surveillance, notified the local police every single day of surveillance with the other two NYPD officers, retired, documented everything, made a few thousand dollars on the case, and then moved on with his life.
All he knew about the subject that he was following was that the man was alleged to have stolen some money in China, but it was a financial thing, no big deal.
And he moved on with his life.
And then on October 28th, 2020, you know this, Roger, the pre-dawn pounding at the door.
And my children were younger.
Obviously, this has been five years now.
And, you know, the first thing you think when you hear that knock is someone, your children, like is everybody alive.
It's the mother's worst nightmare to go to the door and hear Michael McMahon, because it's my son's name too.
And for that minute, you think, this is it.
Prepare yourself.
Something's happened.
No, they were there to see my husband.
And they just walked in, Roger.
It was so casual.
They were talking to my husband in the hallway.
And my husband said, Are you here about some other case he had worked on?
They said, no, no, we know you from that case, which was weird.
They let him walk to his bedroom, get dressed.
They were petting my dog.
They didn't go to his office.
They didn't take his guns.
They didn't take his computers.
He wasn't handcuffed.
The whole thing was strange.
And then he gets to get taken away.
And I'm panicking.
I'm what the hell just happens, you know.
And I'm in a daze.
And then I don't hear from him for hours and hours.
Apparently, when he went to be interrogated, he spoke freely.
He didn't know why he was there.
They never told him why he was there.
But he's a cop.
He thinks like a cop if something was wrong or something was, he wanted to be a part of the discussion, like what happened.
And as they're speaking to him, they're asking him strange questions.
And he remembers a lot of the case and very forthcoming, happy to talk and help.
And then turns out he's being arrested for the Foreign Agents Registration Act, FARA, which was bizarre.
He only worked for a New York company.
He had no evidence that he found that he had in his possession that had anything.
There was nothing.
And interstate stalking, Roger, interstate stalking.
He's a private investigator.
He was parked on a public street.
The subjects never saw him.
So we're thinking, how could this must be a mistake?
Must be a mistake.
So he comes home.
The press are outside our house.
There's a big article in the New York Post that he's China's muscle and he's intimidating people and harassing people.
Like, what is going on?
So, immediately, Roger, we went to his office and we started looking at all his emails.
He had saved everything, every invoice, every text message.
He had everything.
And we're trying to look at it, go, there's nothing here.
It's a few days of work, a few hours of work from 2016 and 17.
What are they talking about?
This is bizarre, right?
So, of course, we're going to fight this.
Of course.
And, Roger, as you know, as soon as you take that position, you're done.
I think it is abundantly clear in the case of retired New York police detective Michael McMahon.
This is an upside-down crafted narrative that was developed where Michael McMahon became the villain while the U.S. government protected a rogue Chinese government official and his wife who lied to obtain residency in the U.S. while laundering tens of millions of dollars of embezzled dollars.
Let me say two things abundantly clear: there is no evidence whatsoever that Michael McMahon was ever paid by any foreign entity, and he's a fully licensed, fully licensed private investigator.
So, the media here has glossed over the failure to provide due process and a willful January 6th-style behavior by the U.S. government to deny key exculpatory information to defense counsel for Michael McMahon and to possible manipulation of the U.S. government by the victims who happen to be connected to the Chinese Communist Party who made false statements to enter the country.
This is an upside-down world.
If I hadn't experienced this myself in the District of Columbia, I would find it hard to believe.
I know.
And, you know, I think there's some things about this case which are truly shocking.
So, if back in 2017, the FBI knew Mike was, they had enough evidence that Mike was innocent, and yet they obtained illegal search warrants for years and lied in the search warrants.
And we've heard this before, haven't we?
Doesn't this sound familiar?
It does.
Now, the four years that this investigation went on between the FBI in New Jersey, the New Jersey FBI Red Bank office, and the EDNY, the FBI never spoke to the three NYPD detectives, my husband or the two other NYPD detectives retired who were intelligence officers.
They never called them.
They never.
And yet, the FBI was speaking to the Chinese agents all the time, interviewing them, allowing them to flee to China and return.
They were protecting the alleged victim.
There's communications between Robert Riley, who was an FBI agent retired in New Jersey, and the alleged victim regarding their immigration, a civil lawsuit against them.
There was so much collusion going on between the actual criminals in this case, while my family was left vulnerable.
Roger, if these people were as dangerous as they're claiming they were, my family was left vulnerable.
We were sitting ducks, and they left.
They did not protect us.
And they had an obligation.
There's a law called the duty to warn.
When you have been targeted by any foreign entity, you must alert the person that they have been targeted.
And instead, they protected the enemy in this case.
So here we go.
We're like, we're going to go to trial.
Here we are going to trial.
And of course, exculpatory evidence is buried.
We can't put in evidence.
We're not allowed to talk about Mike's career on the NYPD.
Can you imagine, Roger?
We cannot tell the jury why this man would never, ever hurt anybody.
He's the opposite of that.
No good deeds.
You know that.
They did that in trial.
They did it all the time.
Yeah, I know I'm very, Very familiar with it.
In my case, I was specifically prohibited from the judge from arguing that I had either been selectively prosecuted or that there were political motivations behind my prosecution.
I was also prohibited from saying that the prosecutors in my case offered me a deal where they would have recommended no jail time if I had just agreed to testify falsely against President Donald Trump, which, of course, I refused to do.
The essence of the U.S. government's case against Mike McMahon is that he didn't file under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
But to be guilty of failing to file under that law, one must factually know that their clients are members of foreign government.
The FBI and the DOJ failed to demonstrate in this case, based on what I read in your book, that Mike McMahon factually knew that his co-defendants were part of the Chinese Operation Fox Hunt program.
There's no legal requirement in FAR for someone to obtain a signed deposition from a client stating under penalty of perjury that they're not an over or class nine member of the foreign government.
Mike McMahon had no idea what was going on.
He was doing legal work, and the government never proved that he was acting on behalf of a foreign government.
On the other hand, he was persecuted by a politicized Justice Department.
When we come back, I'm going to ask Martha Byrne about where Mike McMahon is now and what the next step is in terms of getting true justice in his case.
You're listening to the Stone Zone here on the Red Apple Audio Networks talking to mother and wife of Martha Byrne, who is married to the former New York Police Department Sergeant Michael McMahon.
They have three kids.
They've been married for 32 years.
This is a shocking story of injustice, folks.
When we come back, we're going to ask Martha Byrne where the case stands now and what you can do to help Martha Byrne and her husband, Michael McMahon, and their children get justice and move on with their lives.
You're listening to the Stone Zone.
Wherever you do, please don't touch that dial.
At Manhattan University, a graduate degree is not out of reach.
You'll gain real-world skills, credentials, employers' value, and connections to New York City's top companies.
Choose from their new Master of Science degrees in healthcare, informatics, digital marketing, and analytics, business analytics, or financial analytics.
All built around hands-on learning and industry partnerships.
Graduate ready to lead, not just work.
Take the next step at manhattan.edu/slash graduate Manhattan University.
Lead the future.
The Stone Zone.
Entertaining and informative.
On the Red Apple Podcast Network.
Welcome back to the Stone Zone.
We're joined today with Martha Byrne.
She's a three-time Emmy Award-winning actress, writer, and producer with a career spanning over 30 years in the entertainment industry at the age of 10.
Martha starred on Broadway in the hit show Annie, and she's had a successful career.
But she joins us today, not as an actress, not as a professional, but as a wife and mother to tell the horrific story of persecution of her husband, former New York City police detective Michael McMahon.
She has memorialized this incredible story in a book entitled In the Interest of Justice by Martha Byrne.
You can find it online.
It has gotten rave reviews.
It is a book that every American should read because it is shocking.
It details the attacks on her family by the Obama-Biden Justice Department and the unrelenting fight by Martha Byrne to clear her husband's name.
Martha, we got about five minutes.
First of all, how is your husband doing today?
Well, he was in a federal prison in Michigan, a low-security prison.
They sent him 600 miles away.
Even at the sentencing.
By the way, Roger, at the trial, nobody testified against my husband.
The case agent didn't testify.
The victims couldn't identify my husband in court.
And the victims asked for no jail time and no restitution.
And the judge gave him 18 months in federal prison because he had no remorse for the victims.
Roger, we've just explained who these victims are.
These people perjured themselves to put my husband in federal prison.
And they sent him 600 miles away as a retired cop into general population.
He has been that he was there for almost four months.
He is now in a halfway house in New Jersey.
He is a warrior, Roger.
He went to federal prison for the truth.
He refused.
He's done nothing wrong.
He committed no crime, Roger.
So we're desperately trying.
And I listen, you know, Donald Trump, when he hears this story, he is going, first of all, talk about Back the Blue.
NYPD persecuted.
Same tactics, making up a case.
This was legal PI work, Roger.
They took it and they made it look nefarious for the jury, and they lied to the jury every single day.
He's a hero.
I think it's abundantly clear his real crime here is that he stumbled much too close to the nefarious illegal operations of the Chinese Communist Party right here inside the United States, where they have set up their own police stations and where Chinese special operators are monitoring their own citizens here in the U.S.
As a private investigator and a decorated police officer, Mike McMahon stumbled into that operation, and that had to be covered up because it made those in power look very, very bad.
This is a shocking story.
It should be shocking to every American.
I urge you to get Martha Burns' terrific book, In the Interests of Justice.
But beyond that, I urge everyone out there to pray for justice in this matter.
I learned in my own trial, in my own horrific fight for justice in which I was targeted with the Justice Department.
I could have walked away free, no problem at all.
All I had to do was agree to lie under oath and incriminate Donald Trump.
I would have had to make it up, by the way, because I'm not aware of anything the president did wrong, and I did nothing wrong.
In fact, Robert Mueller's final report, which the judge refused to give my attorneys, my defense attorneys at trial, on page 178, we later learned, becomes very clear that they found no evidence of Russian collusion, WikiLeaks collaboration, or any other crime on my part.
Yet yet a jury and a judge who essentially prohibited me from having any defense whatsoever, a judge who withheld exculpatory evidence, very much like the judge in Mike McMahon's case, was ready to send me to prison.
Blessed Mother Visitation00:02:04
The prosecutors recommended seven to nine years.
So I have lived this, and this story should be shocking for every American.
Martha, other than buying and reading a great book, which I strongly recommend, what can people do today to help you and your family?
Like you said, prayer, prayer, prayer.
I mean, I know you read the book.
I was visited by the Blessed Mother right before my husband was arrested.
And she came into my heart and strengthened me.
And the prayer has gotten us through this.
The Blessed Mother has gotten us through this of prayers.
I would also encourage everyone to, if you don't mind, I know Eddie Gallagher, the Navy SEAL captain, who is also falsely arrested for murder, who started the Pipe Hitter Foundation, which is H pipehitterfoundation.org.
They have been supporting us.
They support first responders who are falsely accused and arrested and lives are destroyed.
They've been with us for years.
I'm so grateful to them.
They've been a supporter there.
So pipehitterfoundation.org, there's a page direct just for Mike, and we're so grateful.
We're so grateful, our entire family.
All right, we have to wrap it up there.
Please join us in praying for Michael McMahon, his wife of 32 years, Martha Byrne, and their children, Michael, Max, and Anne Marie.
God bless you, Martha.
Never give up the fight.
Folks, thanks for joining us today on the Stone Zone.
Until tomorrow, God bless you and Godspeed.
Thanks for listening to the Stone Zone with Roger Stone.
You can hear The Stone Zone with Roger Stone weeknights at 8 on 77 WABC.
If you like the podcast, share it with your friends and listen anytime at WABCRadio.com and download the WABC Radio app.
Hit that subscribe button on all major podcast platforms.
Plus, follow WABC on social, on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and X. See you next time for a new episode.
So you never have to wonder what the heck is going on here.
24/7 Healthcare Heroes00:00:53
Rural Americans deserve access to the best our nation has to offer, especially when it comes to health care.
Across every state and every community, America's rural hospitals are the first line of defense, protecting our families, neighbors, and loved ones.
No matter where you live, hospital care doesn't clock out.
They're there 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
Each year, America's over 5,000 hospitals care for millions of patients, providing 24-7 emergency care, delivering babies, cancer treatments, and other life-saving care that patients rely on.
Behind every one of those patients are doctors, nurses, and caregivers working tirelessly to keep people healthy and safe.
Hospitals are our community's lifelines.
They employ our neighbors and keep our families health.
But now, some in Congress are threatening access to care.
Tell Congress, protect patient care to keep America strong.