Thread by @Z_Everson

Former Rep. John Ratcliffe’s campaign paid $11,000 to the firm that designed his new personal website.

@Forbes found no evidence that firm did any work on behalf of Ratcliffe’s old campaign.

The expenditure could violate @FEC rules.

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@Forbes @FEC John Ratcliffe's old campaign has paid his wife $30,000 to manage its books, as @Forbes reported last week.

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@Forbes @FEC 12 days after John Ratcliffe left office as Trump’s director of national intelligence, someone registered a new website with the domain john-ratcliffe dot com.

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@Forbes @FEC A few months later, John Ratcliffe’s campaign began paying tTelegraph Creative for “website design.”

Totaling $11,000, they were the campaign’s first-ever payments to that company.

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@Forbes @FEC There's plenty of evidence that Telegraph Creative built John Ratcliffe's new personal site.

Most notably, metadata shows that a video was stored in a folder called “John Ratcliffe” which was a subfolder of “Telegraph Clients.”

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@Forbes @FEC And John Ratcliffe's new website is most-definitely not campaign related.

It does not mention donations, volunteering or a district—but it does include a page titled “Private sector,” which says “Hire John.”

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@Forbes @FEC .@johnratcliffe and his campaign treasurer, wife Michele, did not respond when asked what website was designed with $11,000 in campaign funds.

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@Forbes @FEC @JohnRatcliffe I stand corrected—

John Ratcliffe didn't answer my questions, but it appears he did in fact respond.

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@Forbes @FEC @JohnRatcliffe Anyway, check out the article for more info. And support this reporting, if you can, be subscribing to @Forbes. Thanks.

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