A second batch of newly released, top secret FBI files on Ivana Trump shed more light on the bureau’s attempt to solve the mysteries regarding her whereabouts and citizenship status prior to becoming a U.S. citizen.
The first tranche of documents on Trump were released earlier this year following a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Bloomberg in the wake of the Trump matriarch’s death. Those documents showed that the FBI opened a “preliminary inquiry” on Trump’s immigration status in March 1989 due to her ties to Czechoslovakia, then a Communist country.
It was later closed in 1991 after “no outstanding leads” remained, but the newly released memos disclose alleged discrepancies in her immigration file that puzzled the FBI at the time.
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One document marked Oct. 5, 1989, said that Trump’s Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) file was found to be “fraught with inconsistencies regarding dates of residence, schooling and employments,” following an analysis.
It cited a letter within her INS file from the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement. In it, Trump said that she attended Charles University in Prague until 1973, then moved to Quebec after her studies until 1977.
But the memo implies that some critical information was missing.
“There is no mention of any time spent in Austria,” it said. “Nowhere else in her INS file is there any indication of ever having attended Charles University.”
It was later confirmed that Trump received her master’s degree in physical education from the university in 1972.
As for her time in Austria, later reports state that she briefly married Austrian ski instructor Alfred Winklmayr. In what her lawyer called a “Cold War marriage,” the union existed for the “sole purpose” of getting Trump an Austrian passport to leave Czechoslovakia for Canada.
That marriage is what threw the FBI for such a loop.
“In addition to the inconsistencies of her whereabouts, there exists the continual changing of her citizenship,” the memo continued. “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.”
