Earlier today, we told you that Melania Trump may have some explaining to do about her visa status. On a number of occasions before getting her green card in 2001, she says she flew back to her native Slovenia to renew her H-1B visa–something she shouldn’t have had to do, since an H-1B is good for at least three years. This led a number of immigration experts to suggest she was actually on a visa that wouldn’t have allowed her to legally do any modeling work while in the United States.
Well, after being bombarded with questions about this potential bombshell for most of Thursday, Melania felt compelled to speak up via Twitter.
— MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) August 4, 2016
The same statement was also posted to her Facebook page. Notably, this was the first time Melania had ventured onto social media since announcing that her Website had been ixnayed in the face of evidence she’d lied about earning a degree from a Slovenian university.
When Politico’s Ben Schreckinger, who first raised questions about Melania’s visa status, read this statement, he couldn’t help but notice what it didn’t address.
“By specifying the year 1996, Trump’s statement conspicuously avoids addressing multiple reports and photographs that place her in the United States and working as a model in 1995, as well as a statement by Trump’s Slovenian biographer to POLITICO that she was performing modeling work in the United States that was not “technically” legal during her first trips there in 1995.”
Schreckinger refers to the nude pictures of Melania that ran in the Sunday and Monday editions of the New York Post, which were taken in 1995. Additionally, according to a biography of Melania published by two Slovenian writers in February, Melania was already in the process of moving to New York City by 1995. One of the authors, Bojan Pozar, told Politico that during that time frame, she came to New York for “temporary business opportunities that she had as a model.”
Pozar added that while this was a common practice for models from former Communist countries at the time, it wasn’t “technically” legal. Sara Ziff of the Model Alliance, a group that fights for better working conditions in the modeling industry, recalled that many shady agencies had foreign models on their payrolls when they were actually on tourist or business visas that didn’t allow them to work in the United States.
Additionally, Melania’s earliest known roommate in the States, recalls that Melania was already in New York in 1995, and frequently returned home for the holidays. Add it up, and it’s pretty clear that Melania is lying. She says she first came to the States in 1996, but all available evidence puts her in New York in 1995.
The only question here–where’s the truth? Either Melania had an H-1B visa that allowed her to work, and she thus had no reason to go back to Slovenia to have it stamped. Or she was here on a tourist or business visitor’s visa, and was thus working in the United States illegally.
In the former case, she must have gotten advice from a REALLY bad lawyer. She wouldn’t have needed to go get her visa stamped. Instead, she would have only needed to apply for an extension–and unless there were some skeletons in her closet that we don’t know about, it would have been readily granted. In the latter case, a number of immigration lawyers interviewed by Politico agreed that Melania would have committed visa fraud–thus putting her 2006 naturalization in jeopardy, even though she is married to an American citizen.
Whatever the case, the irony is obvious. After all, Donald Trump has taken a harder line on immigration than any major-party candidate in recent memory. And yet, his own wife has been less than forthcoming about her own status. Apparently Trump knows that he and his wife have been busted. The man notorious for going into a tweetstorm at even the tiniest perceived slight has been notably quiet on this issue.
If this ends up being one of the rocks on which Trump’s campaign to buy the presidency ultimately runs aground, it will be like Al Capone being nailed for tax evasion.
