Thread by @Z_Everson

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

The expenditure could violate @FEC rules.

Here's how @forbes was able to report the story—

1/

forbes.com/sites/zachever…

@FEC @Forbes In July 2021, a tipster pointed out that Trump's former DNI John Ratcliffe was paying his wife $3,000/month to manage the books of his old campaign.

FEC filings confirmed it, and we reported it.

2/

forbes.com/sites/zachever…

@FEC @Forbes I added Ratcliffe's to my running list of campaigns to check on the FEC deadlines.

And, sure enough, he kept paying his wife.

3/

forbes.com/sites/zachever…

@FEC @Forbes When reporting the latest installment of "Ratcliffe pays his wife $3,000/month with campaign funds" last week, I was curious how many transactions his zombie campaign even had for his wife to keep track of.

So I started scrolling through his latest filing to count.

4/

@FEC @Forbes The count stopped though when I came across $7,200 in payments for "website design."

Seemed like a lot of money for the website for a dormant campaign!

5/

docquery.fec.gov/pdf/092/202201…

@FEC @Forbes A search on Google showed that Ratcliffe had launched a website since his last filing,

And SelectTools > Date show the date Google first indexed the site too.

6/

@FEC @Forbes Searching just Ratcliffe's new site (using Google's "site:" function) for the name of the firm his campaign paid for web design turned up the first bit of evidence that Telegraph Creative designed his new personal website.

7/

google.com/search?q=teleg…

@FEC @Forbes And a reverse IP search showed that John-Ratcliffe dot com was on the same server as Telegraph Creative's own websites.

Took a couple more hours to track down, but at least 23 of the 24 sites on the server are corrected to Telegraph Creative too.

8/

viewdns.info/reverseip/?hos…

@FEC @Forbes Still felt more proof was needed though to show that Telegraph Creative performed "website design" for Ratcliffe's campaign though.

So I turned to @z3dster.

9/

@FEC @Forbes @z3dster With a few minutes, @z3dster found it—

Metadata from the video that on the site’s homepage shows that the file was stored in a folder called “John Ratcliffe” which was a subfolder of “Telegraph Clients.”

Thanks @z3dster!

10/

@FEC @Forbes @z3dster As for the search that Ratcliffe hadn't hired Telegraph Creative to create an actual campaign site, I looked at

-Ratcliffe's campaign site
-its source code
-snapshots of it in archive dot org
-Telegraph Creative's site & social media to see if it advertised any such work...

11/

-Ratcliffe's earlier campaign finance filings
-FEC records for any other campaign ever paying Telegraph Creative
-Google and Lexis Nexis for sites referencing both Ratcliffe and Telegraph
-registration info for Ratcliffe's campaign site

12/

And, of course, @hunchly was running in the background, quietly preserving a copy on my computer of every web page I visited.

13/

Many of the search techniques came from @IntelTechniques. Highly recommend reading the latest version of his "Open Source Intelligence Techniques."

14/14

inteltechniques.com/book1.html