Set Assignee to Group

Is it possible to assign a group to an issue? I am writing a plug-in function that generates subIssues. I've seen others' code that assigns the subIssues to specific people; but not groups.

Instead of:

User sampleUser;
sampleUser = UserUtils.getUser(samplePerson);
subTaskIssue.setAssignee(sampleUser);

Is there something like this that I could use:

Group sampleGroup;
sampleGroup = "ABCGroup";
subTaskIssue.setAssignee(sampleGroup);

The API specifies the method signature:
public void setAssignee(String assignee)