A Twitter-obsessed woman from rural Ohio ended up testifying before Robert Mueller's grand jury after making a Twitter account that took the same name as the Russian hacker who broke into the Democratic Party's emails to tilt the 2016 election toward Trump, reports Buzzfeed News.
In the summer of 2016, Cassandra Ford made a Twitter account called Guccifer2.
Ford went to Penn State and was drawn deep into Twitter by following ISIS recruitment there for a paper. She's an anti-Clinton registered Republican who supports Ron Paul but says she doesn't like Donald Trump.
Buzzfeed says Ford made the account "as something between a joke and an experiment."
“I do think it’s kind of funny, because if anybody’s going to walk into an international hacking incident and have no clue about it, it would be me for sure,” Ford said to BuzzFeed News.
Although the hacking was quickly blamed on Russians, Ford was "skeptical" and peppered the account with references to the Russian intelligence agency responsible.
"Ford doesn’t like to think of what she was doing with her account as trolling," Buzzfeed says, but she did actively disseminate stolen emails.
She also drew in Democratic Party operatives and depleted the party's resources by prompting investigators to work on her.
“It was like this typical active-measures account, sowing doubt and confusion,” recalled Adam Parkhomenko, the party's national field director in 2016, who spent months "obsessing" over the account.
Speaking to Buzzfeed, Ford also laughed at how the FBI was using resources to investigate her.
She found it "funny" that prosecutors printed out her anti-Democratic Party @Guccifer2 tweets and were "grasping at straws" by asking her about them.
“He was like, do you have any Russian friends? Do you know any Russians? I really sat there and thought about it, and was like, I don’t think I do," Ford said.