Glenn Beck spent the first hour of his radio program today discussing reports that Fox News may fire Bill O'Reilly in the wake of multiple sexual harassment allegations and settlements. While defending O'Reilly and attacking Media Matters for supposedly leading "a giant smear campaign" against him, Beck went off on a tangent to again insist that he stands by his belief that Abdulrahman Alharbi, a bystander who was injured in the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, was really an al Qaeda "control agent" and "money man" who orchestrated the attack, which was then covered up by the U.S. government.
In the wake of the bombing, Beck spent weeks baselessly accusing Alharbi of being the mastermind behind the attack and, in 2014, Alharbi responded by suing Beck for defamation and slander. Beck vigorously fought the lawsuit, but after the federal judge overseeing the case ruled that Beck and his company would have to reveal the names of the confidential sources they used while leveling the unfounded accusations against Alharbi, he agreed to settle last year.
Despite settling, Beck continues to insist that his conspiracy theory is true, declaring on his radio show today that he will go to his grave insisting that he was right and only settled because he was forced to do so by his insurance company.
Beck said the fact that O'Reilly and Fox have settled sexual harassment claims against him is not proof that O'Reilly is actually guilty, just as his settlement in the Alharbi case is not proof that he was wrong.
"I just settled a case in Boston that I will go to my grave [insisting] I'm right," Beck said. "I'm right! My insurance company pressured me for over a year, Premier [Radio Network] pressured me for over a year, 'Glenn, settle it.' 'I'm right.' 'Settle it.' When it got to a million and a half dollars of uninsured money that I had to pay out and it was looking at yet another probably three million dollars, I was willing to take it to the Supreme Court, my partners weren't. 'Settle it.'"
"So I settled that," Beck said, adding that all of the documents from the case are open and available to the public so that anybody can look at them and see that he was right. But nobody will do that, he insisted, so that they can keep "smearing me."
"It's still being used to smear me," he said. "How am I being smeared? He settled, he must have been guilty."
