Earlier this month, when a Twitter account claiming to be close to the grand jury deciding whether to charge Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown tweeted out a possible leak, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch launched an investigation.
But according to the Huffington Post, a spokesperson for McCulloch revealed that he came to the conclusion that the account had been hacked by simply interviewing the St. Louis County woman associated with the Twitter account.
That’s some in-depth investigation, huh?
Susan M. Nichols had operated a Twitter account under the name @thesusannichols. In early October, a tweet sent from the account indicated that the user knew “someone sitting on the grand jury of this case” and that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Ferguson, Missouri, Police Officer Darren Wilson in Brown’s death. The message was quickly deleted, and Nichols began telling multiple media outlets that her account had been hacked and that she had not used it in months.
McCulloch said after the possible leak that he would be “shocked if a member of the grand jury said anything.” On Thursday, he announced that his office had concluded that the account was hacked “and the origin/author of the tweet is unknown.”
McCulloch spokesman Ed Magee told The Huffington Post that Nichols had voluntarily spoken with investigators and never went under oath.
“She said she has nothing to do with it, and that’s what we went by and we couldn’t prove otherwise,” Magee said. “She was very cooperative, came in and talked to us.” She didn’t have a lawyer, he said.
It’s also worth mentioning that while investigators looked at Nichols’ computer, they did not examine her cell phone or other electronic devices, according to Magee.
McCulloch’s office subpoenaed Twitter for information about @thesusannichols, but the company said it didn’t have IP logs affiliated with the account, according to Magee. (Twitter’s website says some information like IP logs “may only be stored for a very brief period of time.”) Investigators did not look for information associated with @smde7763, the Twitter handle that @thesusannichols adopted shortly after attention was called to the original username, because Magee said it was “a different account.” (But the two Twitter handles have seemingly identical histories of tweets going back over a year.)
Magee said the investigation was complicated by the fact that there was “no crime that she committed” and that Nichols was talking to the office voluntarily. McCulloch’s statement on Thursday said that Nichols “has no connection with any member of the grand jury.”
For more on McCulloch’s thorough investigation, click here.
SOURCE: Huffington Post | PHOTO CREDIT: Getty
