The Bizarre Story Of Why The FBI Suspected This Ohio Woman Was A Notorious Russian Hacker
In 2016, Cassandra Ford renamed a Twitter account for the persona leaking hacked Democratic emails. That earned the FBI's interest and a subpoena from special counsel Robert Mueller.
Kevin Collier
BuzzFeed News Reporter
Reporting From Washington, DC
Posted on October 3, 2018, at 9:01 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON Cassandra Ford tends to stay online late into the evening and then sleep in. So when two FBI agents dispatched by special counsel Robert Muellers office pounded on her boyfriends door at 10 in the morning in April of this year, they woke her up.
She stumbled downstairs and opened the door, her jaw dropping when they handed her a subpoena telling her she had to testify before a Washington grand jury in two weeks. Ford didnt recognize the first agent, who was tall, bearded, and gruff. He was like, If you dont go, its not going to be good for you, kind of threatening, she recalled.
But she knew the other agent, Scott Halper. Back in August 2016, hed taken her out for coffee in her native Defiance, Ohio, to talk about the unusual way she was using Twitter. He was friendly enough at the time he just wanted to chat about a Twitter account shed registered that June with the username @Guccifer2.
Shed created the account as something between a joke and an experiment a riff off the hacktivist persona Guccifer 2.0, who at the time was slowly releasing files stolen from the Democratic National Committee. It would be months before the US government would publicly identify Guccifer 2.0 as a front for Russias GRU military intelligence agency, the same group that now stands accused of hacking into the DNC and taking the emails.
But during her first meeting with Halper, she never felt like she was being investigated. Halper had even told her she should consider joining the bureau.
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