First Lady Melania Liked ‘Einstein Visa’ Tweet With Video Criticizing President Trump
First lady Melania Trump has stayed silent around how she secured a so-called “Einstein visa” for people with "extraordinary ability” while dating Donald Trump more than a dozen years ago, but she appears to have liked a video calling the president a hypocrite for his immigration policies.
Related: Melania Trump Follows Her Husband's Least Favorite Person on Twitter: Barack Obama
The first lady from her verified, personal Twitter account @MELANIATRUMP on Sunday night liked a tweet with the embedded video, “How Exactly Did Melania Trump Get an ‘Einstein Visa?’” according to the Trump family tracking bot @TrumpsAlert.
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By Monday morning, the like was removed. But it had been screenshot by Twitter users including The David Pakman Show, which produced the video around a report last Thursday questioning how Melania Trump received legal residency in the United States through a green card with the elite EB-1 program.
Applicants to the program "must be able to demonstrate extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics through sustained national or international acclaim," according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. In 2001, when Melania Trump obtained legal residency, only five people from her home country of Slovenia received the so-called “Einstein visa.”
Michael Wildes, an attorney for the first lady and her family, on Friday told Newsweek that she “obtained her Green Card legally and was more than amply qualified and solidly eligible for the Extraordinary Ability Green Card,” but declined to elaborate on how.
In the video clip of his show, David Pakman doubted that Melania Trump qualified for the EB-1 program and said, “The only extraordinary thing I’ve seen her do is tolerate being married to Trump, to be perfectly honest.”
“First and foremost, was there cronyism? Was there potentially even more than that at play, bribery?” Pakman said.
“Number two, this is yet another instance of Trump pushing policy to appease his base that is totally disconnected from how he lives,” Pakman continued, “Because if we were to presume, to suspect that there was some special treatment for Melania on the basis of being Donald Trump’s girlfriend at the time, then it stands to reason that Donald Trump lived his life in a very different way than what he’s advocating in terms of policy.”
President Donald Trump has vowed to end “chain migration,” which enabled Melania Trump, once she had her green card, to sponsor her parents for legal residency and put them on the path to U.S. citizenship.
Pakman on Monday speculated that the first lady was watching the video and accidentally hit the like button, and that her staff later caught it and un-did the action.
“Probably, because we weren’t saying the nicest thing about Melania in that video,” the show’s producer Patrick Ford said.
It does not appear to be the first time the first lady has liked something embarrassing to President Trump.
She apparently liked a May 2017 tweet stating, “Seems the only #Wall @realDonaldTrump’s built is the one between him and @FLOTUS #Melania #trump,” and un-liked it shortly after.