Last year, Glenn Beck agreed to settle a defamation lawsuit filed against him stemming from his coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, as we explained at the time:
In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, Glenn Beck launched a crusade to prove that the United States government was covering up what “really” happened during the terrorist attack.
According to Beck, Abdulrahman Alharbi, a Saudi Arabian student who was injured in the bombing, was not simply a victim but was really an al Qaeda “control agent” who had recruited the Tsarnaev brothers to carry out the attack. Though Alharbi had briefly been considered a person of interest in the early part of the investigation, he was quickly cleared by investigators. But Beck nevertheless spent days accusing Alharbi of having played a direct role in organizing the bombing and accusing anyone who didn’t believe him of having been duped by a government conspiracy to cover up Alharbi’s involvement.
Eventually, Beck’s entire conspiracy theory collapsed when one of his own experts told him that his theory “doesn’t make sense,” but that didn’t stop Beck from continuing to assert that Alharbi was the “money man” behind the bombing.
In 2014, Alharbi sued Beck for slander and defamation and Beck has been fighting the lawsuit tooth and nail. When the federal judge overseeing the case ruled last month that Beck and his company must reveal the names of the confidential sources upon whom they relied in leveling the unfounded accusations against Alharbi, Beck vowed to go to jail rather than do so.
But it seems that Beck’s grandstanding was all for show, as yesterday, he agreed to settle the lawsuit with Alharbi for an undisclosed amount.
On his radio program today, while Beck was celebrating the dismissal of a separate lawsuit against him, he brought up the settlement of the Alharbi lawsuit and vowed to one day set the record straight about it.
Beck asserted that he had settled the Alharbi lawsuit “for a small sum of money” and only did so because “it was going to go all the way to the Supreme Court [and] it would have probably cost me about five million dollars.” Beck said that, according to the terms of the settlement, he has the ability to “open up the entire record of the case,” which he intends to do so that he can prove that the government engaged in a massive cover-up to conceal the truth about what really happened in the attack.
“That case is not sealed,” Beck said. “We’re going to present this to you and show you exactly what happened in the Boston bombing case. There is something very wrong and it has little to do with the guy who was suing me and everything to do with the United States government, which was the point in the first place.”
