Ex-Fox News Producer Charged With Working For Russian Oligarch

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Jack Hanick, a onetime director at Fox News, has been indicted on charges of working for a sanctioned Russian oligarch to establish TV networks in Russia and in other European countries.

Hanick, 71, is accused of working for Konstantin Malofeyev, who since 2014 has been under U.S. sanctions that were imposed in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. The Department of Justice announced on Thursday that it had unsealed an indictment charging Hanick with violating the sanctions and with lying to the FBI.

Hanick worked at Fox News from its founding, in 1996, through August 2011, according to his LinkedIn page. The indictment described Hanick as having worked as a producer, though a Fox News spokesperson said that he was not a producer, and worked instead as a “weekend daytime director.”

The indictment alleges that he went to work for Malofeyev in 2013, and continued to work for him until 2017.

The Treasury Department added Malofeyev to its sanctions list in December 2014, finding that he had been a key source of funding for Russian separatists in Crimea and in Donetsk, a territory of Ukraine. According to the indictment, Hanick continued to work for Malofeyev to launch a cable news network in Russia, Tsargrad TV, which went on the air in April 2015. The network was blocked by YouTube in July 2020.

Hanick was listed as “board chairman” and “general producer” of the network, reporting directly to Malofeyev, according to the indictment. Hanick is also accused of working on Malofeyev’s behalf to establish networks in Greece and Bulgaria, once writing to Malofeyev that the Greek network would grant an “opportunity to detail Russia’s point of view on Greek TV.”

The indictment quotes from other emails between Hanick and Malofeyev, and it cites Hanick’s unpublished memoir, which investigators found in his email account.

Hanick is also accused of lying to FBI agents in February 2021 about his work for Malofeyev, allegedly telling the agents that Malofeyev had no role in his travel to Bulgaria and that he was unaware of Malofeyev’s connection to the Bulgarian network until afterward.

Hanick now lives in London and was arrested there on Feb. 3. U.S. authorities will seek to extradite him.