Melania Trump, third wife to GOP nominee Donald Trump, made a rare public statement Wednesday morning, reiterating on social media that she immigrated legally to the United States.
“I am pleased to enclose a letter from my immigration attorney which states that, with 100% certainty, I correctly went through the legal process when arriving in the USA,” her Twitter account read.
— MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) September 14, 2016
The tweet included two pictures of a letter from the law offices of Wildes and Weinberg stating that the former model immigrated to the United States legally.
The letter, which was written by attorney and former Democratic congressional candidate and mayor Michael J. Wildes, stated that, “Mrs. Trump became eligible for citizenship in 2006, after five years of continuous permanent residence.”
The statement comes amid reports that the GOP nominee’s wife may have worked illegally in the United States as a model in 1995 while on a visitor visa.
Trump’s immigration attorney claimed Wednesday these suggestions are 100 percent false.
“Following a review of her relevant immigration paperwork, I can unequivocally state that these allegations are not supported by the record, and are therefore completely without merit,” Wilde’s letter read.
Melania Trump immigration letter by DailyMail.com on Scribd
His statement also comes after Melania Trump has largely disappeared from the campaign trail following an incident in July in which she was caught plagiarizing First Lady Michelle Obama.
Melania Trump’s address on the first night of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, featured passages taken directly from a speech that Michelle Obama delivered in 2008 at the Democratic National Convention.
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee responded to the plagiarism scandal with a series of contradictory statements, nonsensical defenses and opposing strategies, which dragged the story out for days.
“The official word from the Trump operation, at various points since Monday night, is that Melania wrote her speech, and she did not write her speech, and a team of writers wrote her speech, and her speech was not plagiarism, and if it was plagiarism, perhaps Michelle Obama had plagiarized ‘My Little Pony,’ because the speech was full of common platitudes, and it was all Hillary Clinton’s fault, and Michelle Obama did not invent the English language, and OK, fine, it was plagiarism, but it was all a big mistake and no harm was meant by any of it,” the Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi wrote, summing up the entirety of the Trump team’s response to the matter.
The Republican candidate himself kept the story alive – even after the press had mostly moved on – by congratulating his wife on Twitter for giving the most publicized speech “in the history of politics.”
The former model’s speechwriter, Meredith McIver, eventually owned up to the plagiarism, and admitted she left passages from Obama’s speech in the copy of the address heard during the first night of the GOP convention.
Since that incident in July, Melania Trump has disappeared almost entirely from the campaign trail, and her public appearances have become few and far between.
She has, however, commented occasionally on social media, including to respond to questions about her whereabouts.
“Enjoying my life & family and loving our country!” she tweeted on Sept. 10.
