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Jack Hanick spent years openly helping a Russian mogul who had been under U.S. sanctions since 2014 set upa pro-Kremlin TV empire, raising suspicions about whether the American was violating U.S. law. And yet, for most of the past decade, the Justice Department didn’t appear to consider the ex-Fox News staffer too important a target, at least not enough to indict him.
But Hanick’s luck — and that of numerous other people suspected for years of violating U.S. laws penalizing Russia — started to change in fall 2021.
That season, as Russian leader Vladimir Putin prepared his troops for a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States secretly indicted Hanick. A few weeks before Russian missiles rained across Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, U.S. officials quietly had Hanick arrested in Britain. On March 2, 2022, the Justice Department unveiled its main weapon to enforce U.S. sanctions on Russia: Task Force KleptoCapture. The very next day, the department publicly announced that Hanick had been indicted. Then, a month later, the department triumphantly boasted that Konstantin Malofeyev, the Russian oligarch alleged to have employed Hanick, had also been indicted.
The timing was clearly intended to send a message — the United States was cracking down on those who aid Russia’s incursion into Ukraine. But it also amplified a question on the mouths of many critics: Why hadn’t the United States prosecuted these people years earlier? After all, Russia was already facing U.S. sanctionsput in place after it first attacked and occupied Ukraine’s Crimea and other regions in 2014 —a set of penaltiesdesigned to deter further aggression. If more cases had been brought, critics maintain, Putin may have been discouraged from pursuing his large-scale invasion in 2022.
Questions about the timing of cases arose repeatedly during a POLITICO review of the Justice Department’s enforcement of sanctions, export controls and other penalties targeting Russia over itsnear-decade-long assault on Ukraine. The examination coveredhundreds of pages of court records and other material, as well as conversations with more than a dozen former U.S. officials with national security and law enforcement expertise.
The review’s findings suggest that, although Washington has since 2014 imposed multiple rounds of sanctions on Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine, the Justice Department under the Obama and Trump administrations did not prioritize prosecutions related to that war — filing relatively few cases until after Putin escalated it in 2022.
POLITICO applied generous standards for what cases count, finding 14 criminal cases from January 2014 through February 2022.But some of the cases were only tangentially — if at all — related to Ukraine, had roots in export control violations and other alleged crimes prior to the 2014 invasion and may have been pursued war or no war. In fact, when Hanick’s indictment was unveiled in March 2022, the department curiously touted it as “the first-ever criminal indictment charging a violation of U.S. sanctions arising from the 2014 Russian undermining of democratic processes and institutions in Ukraine.”
Such U.S. prosecutions have spiked in themonths since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022. Prosecutors have filed at least 18 casesinvolving indictments or charges targeting at least 39 people. But the records also show that the cases often are built on the alleged misdeeds of suspects dating back several years prior — meaning they potentially could have been prosecuted sooner.
POLITICO’s findings support critics who argue that Washington, and the West more broadly, was too lenient toward Russia for too long, especially when it came to Ukraine. Such critics, who include Russian dissidents and Ukrainian activists, say America in particular should have imposed — and enforced — tougher Ukraine-related sanctions and other penalties more often and faster in the wake of the initial 2014 invasion.
“There was a whole appeasement psychology for a long time,” said Bill Browder, a British financier who has tangled with Putin and long argued for a tougher U.S. approach to the Kremlin. “It’s obvious to anyone who was close to the situation that Putin was maybe 95 percent responsible for the invasion of Ukraine, but we were 5 percent responsible by not doing anything up to this point.”
Justice Department defenders dismiss the idea that U.S. prosecutions could have thwarted Putin’s long-term obsession to fold Ukraine into Russia. They point to several potential reasons the department didn’t prosecute Hanick and others sooner, from the fact that such investigations take time and must meet a high bar to the argument that it wasn’t until 2018, amid anger over Russian interference in U.S. elections, that the U.S. really began aiming sanctions at Russians with significant exposure to the U.S. financial — and legal — system.
Above all, former U.S. prosecutors said they were hampered by a lack of cooperation from other countries, even allies such as Britain, when they wanted to go after sanctions evaders.
Nonetheless, there also is a sense among many former U.S. officials, including multiple former prosecutors, that enforcing Ukraine-related penalties on Russia was not, until last year, a top focus for the Justice Department or the presidents it served.
“I don’t think DOJ saw itself as a big player in this during the Obama administration,” said Dan Fried, a retired U.S. diplomat whose many roles included serving as the State Department’s coordinator for sanctions policy. “They didn’t see themselves as central to this effort in Ukraine. It wasn’t their thing.”
It didn’t help, Fried added, that the Trump administration’s policy toward Russia, though often tough, was “incoherent,” because President Donald Trump appeared to sympathize with Putin.
The Justice Department would not offer on the record or background responses to a lengthy list of questions and attachments from POLITICO laying out its review. But some top department officials have, in effect, acknowledged that U.S. prosecutors could have done more in the past.
In remarks last June, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said that, although the department was “by no means starting on a blank canvas” when it comes to sanctions enforcement, it now has “a new level of intensity and commitment” to the issue in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
“We have turned a corner in our approach,” she said.
Stones left unturned
As Putin sent more troops to Russia’s border with Ukraine in fall 2021, President Joe Biden and his envoys warned that the United States would dramatically expand sanctions, export controls and other penalties on Russia should Putin further invade his neighbor. America’s allies, especially those in Europe, made similar promises.
U.S. economic sanctions, generally speaking, bar their targets from using the U.S. financial system and doing business with Americans, while freezing assets they may hold in the United States. The vast reach of theAmericanfinancial system, especially the use of the dollar, means a target can be severely limited monetarily. Trying to evade the sanctions, or helping someone try to, can amount to a crime. It’s similar for export controls, which limit technology and other material that can be sent to certain countries.
Carrying through on Biden’s promise to Putin led to a scramble in an array of U.S. agencies and departments, with many wanting to show their relevance in what was suddenly the administration’s No. 1 foreign policy priority.
At the Justice Department, officials essentially surveyed lawyers and investigators to find out who had open files that could translate into Russia-related cases, according to a former senior department official familiar with the issue. Officials looked at ongoing investigations and determined which should get more attention and resources so that they could move faster through the legal system. Officials also looked at ways to reorganize the department’s structure so that such cases had more priority within the bureaucracy, coming up with Task Force KleptoCapture, the former official said.
The task force was unveiled as the United States and its allies heaped historic new sanctions on Moscow — adding to the existing sanctions leveled in the years since 2014. The sanctions imposed from 2014 through 2021 had targeted hundreds of Russian individuals and entities and squeezed, but did not fully cut off, some of the country’s business sectors; the goal was to pressure Russia to walk away from Ukraine. The 2022 sanctions went after even more people, entities and sectors, but this time the goal was to be far more punitive, isolating large chunks of the Russian economy from the rest of the world.
“We will leave no stone unturned in our efforts to investigate, arrest, and prosecute those whose criminal acts enable the Russian government to continue this unjust war,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in launching the task force.
The task force has grabbed headlines by pursuing asset forfeitures against Russian oligarchs and other entities, seizing at least two yachts; obtaining warrants for at least five planes; and filing civil complaints to take hold of at least six real estate properties.
But when it came to the newest sanctions and export controls levied in 2022, there wasn’t much the task force or other parts of the department could immediately do in terms of criminal prosecutions. Once such measures are in place, it could be months before people try to evade them, and it can take longer to build a criminal case against those people.
Instead, over the past 13 months the department has primarily pursued criminal cases based on suspected violations of penalties imposed on Russia well before 2022 — the cases that scrambling Justice Department officials began to prioritize the prior fall.
All 18 criminal cases POLITICO found that the Justice Department has pursued over the past 13 months involved suspicious actions that took place prior to 2022, although more than half also alleged such activities dragged into 2022. The cases at times cite sanctions dating back to 2014. They also tend to include charges other than sanctions evasion or export control violations, such as lying on visa applications or money laundering. Many, but not all, fell under the purview of the task force. POLITICO applied a broad definition to what would count, including some foreign influence and other cases that were only distantly linked to Ukraine.
Former U.S. prosecutors say the files on many ofthese cases were likely active for years. After all, they require investigative grunt work such as obtaining and tracking phone, email, travel and shipping records and divining the structure of linked shell companies. And just because a piece of evidence dates to a particular time doesn’t mean that’s when U.S. investigators obtained it.
But most of the indictments — even the initially sealed versions whose dates POLITICO was able to track down — didn’t materialize until after Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
