It is not clear what led the FBI to conclude that special counsel Robert Mueller has jurisdiction over the matter. | Win McNamee/Getty Images Mueller Investigation GOP operative who sued Trump says FBI referred hacking of her email to Mueller Cheri Jacobus says she was subjected to a campaign of online harassment and sabotage after a public fight with the president and one of his top advisers.

Federal law enforcement officials have referred a 2-year-old email hacking investigation to special counsel Robert Mueller, according to the Republican operative who was the target of the hack.

The referral adds yet another dimension to the special counsel’s sprawling probe, even as some of President Donald Trump’s allies portray Mueller’s work as nearing its conclusion.


The operative and Trump critic, Cheri Jacobus, told POLITICO that FBI agents in the bureau’s cyber division informed her in September that they had forwarded their investigation to Mueller because the matter came to exceed the bounds of computer intrusion, the crime that had been the initial focus of the investigation.

It is not clear what led the FBI to conclude that Mueller has jurisdiction over the matter. The special counsel has been investigating Russian election meddling, links between Trump’s campaign and the Kremlin, and other suspected wrongdoing, including undisclosed lobbying by foreign governments. Both the FBI’s press office and a spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment. Jacobus said she has not had contact with Mueller’s team.

Jacobus alleges the hacking of her personal email account was part of a broader campaign of harassment and intimidation that followed critical comments she made about Trump during the 2016 Republican primaries. Jacobus, a political PR specialist, served as a source for a 2015 Washington Post investigation that forced a pro-Trump super PAC to shut down. She later sued Trump for defamation.

POLITICO first reported an online catfishing scheme targeting anti-Trump Republican operatives and the hacking of Jacobus’ emails in August 2016, and the FBI opened an investigation of the hack shortly thereafter. The episode was largely forgotten in the chaos of the presidential campaign.

The chain of events that triggered the initial FBI investigation dates to the spring of 2015. On the eve of Trump’s presidential bid, Jim Dornan, a Republican operative then working for Trump, approached Jacobus about a potential job as the campaign’s communications director, according to electronic messages Jacobus has posted to Twitter.

Though Jacobus entered talks with the campaign, the job never panned out. Jacobus said she told Dornan she was not interested. Another person with direct knowledge of the interactions said it was clear after two often-contentious interviews that the role was not a good fit.

Several months later, in October 2015, the Post quoted her saying that in conversations with Trump’s team that spring, campaign manager Corey Lewandowski disclosed plans for a pro-Trump super PAC. Lewandowski insisted to the Post that the Trump campaign had no ties to and did not sanction the group, Make America Great Again PAC. Days after the story, the PAC shut down .

In the fall of 2015, around the time she was quoted discussing Trump’s super PAC by the Post, Jacobus was contacted online by a person posing as a representative of deep-pocketed political donors. The person proceeded to conduct a bizarre, monthslong catfishing scheme that sought to obtain personal and political information from Jacobus and other anti-Trump Republican operatives during the Republican primary.

Posing as an English barrister with rich clients, the person struck up a chat with Jacobus on Twitter, exchanged private messages with her and raised the prospect of a large donation to fund an anti-Trump super PAC. Jacobus put the person in touch with Republican operatives Rick Wilson and Liz Mair, who were then running such a PAC. The person asked Wilson and Mair sophisticated questions about their polling and opposition research on Trump, leading the pair to suspect a fraud and to cut off contact. Jacobus received phone calls and emails from other fake personas who posed as associates of the barrister before discovering it was all a fraud.

Much about the catfishing scheme remains unknown. But in the spring of 2016, Jacobus traced a website domain involved in the scheme to Steven Wessel, a notorious New York con man. At the time, Wessel was out on bail preparing to serve jail time for an unrelated fraud . After Jacobus brought the Wessel connection to the attention of prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, a judge sent Wessel to jail for violating the conditions of his bail, which forbade him from using the Internet.

But Wessel was clearly not acting alone. In August 2016, four months after he was sent to jail — and as POLITICO was preparing to publish news of the catfishing scheme — Jacobus reported that that her personal email account had been hacked and its contents deleted.

At the same time, Jacobus was embroiled in an apparently separate legal fight with the Trump camp. During the 2016 primaries, Jacobus was a regular Fox News and CNN commentator, and she both praised and criticized Trump. One particularly critical segment drew the ire of Trump, who pronounced her a “dummy” on Twitter, as well as Lewandowski, who, like Trump, portrayed her as a disgruntled job-seeker.

Jacobus sued them for defamation in New York. As she feuded publicly with Trump, Jacobus was subjected to a sustained barrage of physical and sexual threats on social media. In January 2017, her defamation case was dismissed .

Emails reviewed by POLITICO show that Jacobus has been in regular contact with FBI agents since the bureau opened an investigation into the hacking of her email after Jacobus filed a complaint around September 2016.

Following Trump’s election, Jacobus relayed additional incidents she considered suspicious to the agents investigating the hack.

Jacobus said she was also interviewed by FBI agents in the Southern District of New York for several hours in February 2017 and has had dozens of phone calls with the agents over the past two years. A lawyer who worked for Jacobus at the time, Jay Butterman, said he also attended the February 2017 meeting and had follow-up conversations with FBI agents.

In November 2017, the FBI asked Jacobus to turn over the remainder of her communications related to the catfishing scheme, some of which she had already submitted, according to an email reviewed by POLITICO.

On Sept. 10 of this year, an FBI agent wrote to Jacobus that he would be calling her, which is when, she said, the bureau informed her of the case’s referral to Mueller.

Jacobus said the agents instructed her to send any new information that arises to the special counsel’s office.