Busted: Fox News producer behind network’s crime fearmongering has criminal past

A Fox News producer who has had a hand in promoting the right-wing network’s crime wave narrative himself has a criminal past, The Daily Beast reports.

Tom Lowell had a role in a 1986 South Florida liquor store burglary that concluded in a drug bust, according to documents obtained by the news outlet.

Although police described the burglary as “extensive,” Lowell, got a “slap on the wrist,” the report said.

A Fox News spokesperson told The Daily Beast that incidents occurred decades ago and that Lowell has since turned his life around.

“This incident took place nearly 40 years ago and is nothing more than a cheap shot at Tom, a stellar journalist, who has worked incredibly hard on his recovery and rebuilt his life after overcoming addiction,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

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Lowell was 26 at the time of the liquor store burglary, which occurred Jan. 7, 1986 in West Palm Beach, the report said. He is now 62.

According to police records obtained by The Daily Beast, Lowell was driving a 1977 Plymouth Volare he’d borrowed from his girlfriend’s father with his friend David M. Frey, with a stolen sawed-off shotgun in the trunk, the report said.

They targeted a liquor store that shared a wall with a hardware store.

The liquor store’s alarm company captured an audio recording of the burglary in which the two men are heard instructing each other about what they should and shouldn’t take from the business, indicating that Lowell was no bystander, the report said.

“They started out in the hardware store then broke into the liquor store. They came in through the roof,” Walter Morris Jr., the son of the couple that owned Moore’s Liquors, told the news outlet.

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The two men used a steel rod from the hardware store to break into the liquor store, and a large chisel and a hammer to break into the cash register, the report said.

They stole a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver that Walter Morris Sr. kept beneath the counter for protection, the report said.

“My dad’s been missing his .38 forever,” Morris Jr. said, according to the report. “He never got it back,”