A former FOX News producer was "quietly arrested" in London. The DOJ revealed that Jack Hanick had dodged US sanctions against Konstantin Malofeyev. Hanick assisted this Putin oligarch in starting a right-wing television show named Tsargrad TV. Hanick modeled Tsargrad after Fox News. The DOJ wants to extradite Hanick from London to New York City.
Malofeyev is an evil guy and worthy of the sanctions and then some. One of his repulsive acts was when he financed Ukrainian separatists who ultimately shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. Flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, the separatists shot the plane and it exploded and crashed in Eastern Ukraine in July of 2014.
Jose Pagliery writes in the Daily Beast.
As the United States increasingly goes after some of the Kremlin’s business tentacles, the latest person arrested for violating U.S. sanctions against Russia is a former Fox News director who left to launch a Russian propaganda network.
The Department of Justice on Thursday revealed that Jack Hanick was quietly arrested in London on Feb. 3 for dodging U.S. sanctions by helping a sanctioned Russian oligarch, Konstantin Malofeyev, start his right-wing Tsargrad TV.
The DOJ simultaneously unsealed a grand jury indictment against him, accusing Hanick of knowingly engaging in business dealings with Malofeyev, who had been formally sanctioned by the U.S. government for his role in financing Russia-backed soldiers in eastern Ukraine who have violently tried to break off from the democratic country since 2014.
snip
Malofeyev was sanctioned in December 2014 by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control for financing separatists in the Donbas region in southeastern Ukraine.
Russia-aligned fighters there operated with the not-so-secret help of that country's military and used that government’s weapons when they shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, killing 283 passengers and 15 crewmembers.
Malofeyev (also spelled in the West as Malofeev) started an Orthodox Christian network called Tsargrad TV. In 2020, he launched a similarly named right-wing political group in Russia with an imperialist bent that would—much like the National Rifle Association does in the United States—pressure politicians to toe the conservative line.
In a 2013 post, Media Matters described Jack Hanick as a vicious and rabid homophobe that actively campaigned for brutal measures against LGBT people in Russia.
Right Wing Watch reported on October 3 that an assemblage of international right-wing activists traveled to Moscow in June to support the Russian government's campaign to restore “traditional values,” an effort that gained international visibility after the passage of laws banning the dissemination of “gay propaganda” and the adoption of children by same-sex couples and families from LGBT-friendly countries. Among the participants in a roundtable discussion titled “Traditional Values: The Future of the European Peoples” was longtime Fox News employee Jack Hanick:
Russian news reports mention that also present to give the American perspective was a man named Jack Hanick. On his LinkedIn page and in interviews, Hanick describes himself as a founding employee of Fox News, who worked there for 15 years as a news director. Fox News confirmed that Hanick was an employee from 1996 through 2011 where he worked in “a production role dealing with the visual aspects of the show” rather than in any “editorial capacity.”
Hanick told the roundtable that God had called on Russia to “stand up for traditional values.”
Right Wing Watch further noted that Hanick told a Russian magazine in August that he admired Russia's increasingly theocratic state. The Russian Orthodox Church has often colluded with President Vladimir Putin - and lent crucial support to the country's anti-gay laws - and Hanick thinks the U.S. has a lot to learn from this model.
You never know what scampers out when you turn over a rock.