Julian Assange Was Tweeting at the Wrong Sean Hannity About Trump and Russia

On Saturday morning, Dell Gilliam, a technical writer from Texas, was bored with the flu. So she decided to pretend to be Sean Hannity on Twitter. She created @SeanHannity_ after the Fox News host’s real account as temporarily deleted after tweeting the phrase “Form Submission 1649 | #Hannity” on Friday night. Around 4 a.m. Saturday morning, Gilliam got a direct message back from the head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. She told The Daily Beast that she “kind of panicked” because Assange really thought he was talking to the real Hannity. Gilliam’s @SeanHannity_ amassed over 24,000 followers. But she did not expect to be setting up a meeting over “other channels” for Assange to send “some news about Warner,” writes Daily Beast. This seems to be a reference to Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. During the election, Wikileaks released Democratic emails stolen by Kremlin hackers. This lead President Donald Trump’s CIA director to say the organization is a “hostile intelligence service.”

“I can’t believe this is happening. I mean… I can. It’s crazy. Nothing can be put past people,” Gilliam, posing as Hannity, wrote to Assange, according to Daily Beast. “I’m exhausted from the whole night. What about you, though? You doing ok?”

Fake Hannity and Assange set up a call for 9:30 a.m. Eastern and Assange said that Hannity could message him on “other channels.” Assange then told Gilliam, who he still thought was Hannity, that he has “some news about Warner.” Less than two days later, Warner claimed the Senate intelligence committee received “end-of-the-year document dumps” that opened “a lot of new questions” about Trump and Russia.