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Secret FBI files reveal questions over Ivana Trump’s immigration status

Donald Trump’s Czechslovakian first wife died last June

Graeme Massie
Los Angeles
Saturday 10 June 2023 15:44 BST
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Newly released top secret FBI files on Ivana Trump have sealed confusion over her immigration status before she became a US citizen.

The second batch of documents related to Donald Trump’s first wife, who died in 2022, detail the Bureau’s efforts to establish which country she was a citizen of before coming to the US.

A first batch of documents released earlier this year stated that the FBI had opened a “preliminary inquiry” into Ivana Trump in March 1989 because of her ties to then-Communist Czechoslovakia.

The file was closed in 1991 because the Bureau had “no outstanding leads” but the latest batch of documents show that agents believed there were inconsistencies, reported The Daily Beast.

A document marked 5 October 1989, states that Ivana’s Immigration and Naturalization Service file was “fraught with inconsistencies regarding dates of residence, schooling and employments.”

In the file, a letter from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement, states that she told them she studied at Charles University in Prague until 1973, then moved to Quebec until 1977.

Agents wrote that “There is no mention of any time spent in Austria” and added that “Nowhere else in her INS file is there any indication of ever having attended Charles University.”

The Bureau later confirmed that Ivana had received a master’s degree in physical education from the university in 1972.

Ivana reportedly married Austrian ski instructor Alfred Winklmayr to gain an Austrian passport so that she could leave Czechoslovakia for Canada.

And her switch of nationalities raised eyebrows at the Bureau.

“In addition to the inconsistencies of her whereabouts, there exists the continual changing of her citizenship,” the document added.

“While still married to (redacted) and presumably still living in Austria, she became a citizen of Austria in 1972. One year after her marriage to Trump, she became a Canadian citizen. And, 5 months after that she became a permanent resident of the US.”

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