The Bizarre Story Of Why The FBI Suspected This Ohio Woman Was A Notorious Russian Hacker

[DonViejo]

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 Mueller’s office pounded on her boyfriend’s 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 didn’t recognize the first agent, who was tall, bearded, and gruff. “He was like, ‘If you don’t go, it’s not going to be good for you,’ kind of threatening,” she recalled.

But she knew the other agent, Scott Halper. Back in August 2016, he’d 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 she’d registered that June with the username @Guccifer2.

She’d 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 Russia’s 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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https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kevincollier/trump-russia-mueller-probe-guccifer-graduate-student-cleared