Sean Hannity's Real Estate Empire Connected to Criminal Investor

Sean Hannity’s newly exposed real estate empire was apparently connected to an extremely shady character who’d pleaded guilty to a host of property-related crimes, according to fresh reporting from the Guardian.

Six years ago, one of the many shell companies we’ve since learned Hannity used to amass his real estate holdings purchased 11 homes in Georgia from a series of corporate middlemen who’d received the properties from Jeff Brock, the paper reported. As it turns out, Brock is a notorious real estate investor who pleaded guilty in 2016 to “bid-rigging and fraud conspiracies committed at public real estate foreclosure auctions in Georgia.”

According to an investigation by The Guardian, some of the homes purchased by Hannity were, in fact, obtained by Brock through banks that were then named in his eventual criminal case, although the Justice Department did not identify if any of the actual houses themselves were purchased fraudulently. The Guardian noted that there’s no evidence that Hannity was aware of Brock’s criminality, and he has not himself been accused of having done anything illegal.

“[Sean Hannity] has no knowledge whether these properties were involved in the fraud,” Hannity’s lawyer Christopher Reeves said in a statement to the Guardian. Brock’s attorney declined to comment.

Still, the unsavory association between Hannity’s real estate empire—estimated to have cost somewhere in the ballpark of $90 million dollars—is sure to draw more scrutiny on the Fox News host, particularly after he was named as a secret client of embattled Trump attorney Michael Cohen.

On his website, Hannity claimed that, actually, his massive property investments were not so much for personal gain as they were charitable activity.

“It is ironic that I am being attacked for investing my personal money in communities that badly need such investment and in which, I am sure, those attacking me have not invested their money,” Hannity wrote.