Melania Trump went MIA for about two full months just as her husband’s presidential campaign really heated up in the late summer and early fall. Some thought that Donald Trump merely pushed her aside in the wake of her plagiarized RNC speech. Some thought that Melania didn’t want to answer questions about her immigration status in the 1990s. While the campaign insisted that Melania would do a press conference about her immigration history, very little came of it. Melania tweeted a statement from her lawyer about how everything she did re: immigration was completely above-board, although that really did not prove anything. I hoped and expected that journalists were looking into Melania’s mysterious mid-‘90s modeling history, and what do you know? It seems like everything was not above-board. Melania was working in the US without proper visas.

Melania Trump was paid for 10 modeling jobs in the United States worth $20,056 that occurred in the seven weeks before she had legal permission to work in the country, according to detailed accounting ledgers, contracts and related documents from 20 years ago provided to The Associated Press.

The details of Mrs. Trump’s early paid modeling work in the U.S. emerged in the final days of a bitter presidential campaign in which her husband, Donald Trump, has taken a hard line on immigration laws and those who violate them. Trump has proposed broader use of the government’s E-verify system allowing employers to check whether job applicants are authorized to work. He has noted that federal law prohibits illegally paying immigrants. Mrs. Trump, who received a green card in March 2001 and became a U.S. citizen in 2006, has always maintained that she arrived in the country legally and never violated the terms of her immigration status. During the presidential campaign, she has cited her story to defend her husband’s hard line on immigration.

The wife of the GOP presidential nominee, who sometimes worked as a model under just her first name, has said through an attorney that she first came to the U.S. from Slovenia on Aug. 27, 1996, on a B1/B2 visitor visa and then obtained an H-1B work visa on Oct. 18, 1996.

The documents obtained by the AP show she was paid for 10 modeling assignments between Sept. 10 and Oct. 15, during a time when her visa allowed her generally to be in the U.S. and look for work but not perform paid work in the country. The documents examined by the AP indicate that the modeling assignments would have been outside the bounds of her visa. It is highly unlikely that the discovery will affect the citizenship status of Mrs. Trump. The government can seek to revoke the U.S. citizenship of immigrants after the fact in cases when it determines a person willfully misrepresented or concealed facts relevant to his naturalization. But the government effectively does this in only the most egregious cases, such as instances involving terrorism or war crimes.

[From Politico]

Personally, I don’t find this to be some huge, major scandal, but that’s probably because I’m quite numb to all of the shenanigans of the Trump campaign. Is it completely and utterly hypocritical in this particular case, given Trump’s violently anti-immigrant rhetoric? For sure. But let’s face it – this was not nearly as bad as Democrats were hoping. She didn’t follow the letter and spirit of the law for a seven-week period in 1996. And you know what? Trump’s supporters (the Deplorables) won’t even care. Because Melania is the “right kind of immigrant,” i.e. she has white skin and she’s attractive.

Here are some photos of Melania and the Orange One in North Carolina on Saturday.

Photos courtesy of Getty.