NEW YORK — Ivana Trump was the focus of secret FBI counterintelligence investigations for at least two years when she was the wife of the real estate developer who would go on to become President of the United States. The reasons that prompted federal authorities to shine a spotlight on the former Czechoslovakian naturalized American ski champion, who died last year at the age of 73 after falling from the stairs of her New York home, are not yet clear.
Papers released by the Bloomberg agency, which they obtained citing the Freedom of Information Act, show that some of Ivana’s acquaintances made the detectives suspicious (but the names were omitted for national security reasons, and not hidden). disclose own sources). According to Czech newspaper Prague Daily Monitor, another element that would have tarnished the reputation of the mother of Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric, Trump’s three adult children, would have been her unwillingness to welcome dissidents and exiles from the communist regimes of the East to help European.
Streams of ink were written about Donald Trump’s alleged business ties to the Soviet Union and then to Putin’s Russia. What is clear, though, is that controversial episodes of his presidency — from perhaps involuntarily divulging state secrets to the foreign minister in Moscow in 2017 to publicly proclaiming that he believes more in Putin than US intelligence — have nothing to do with the case at hand do. The former president, who was married to Ivana, née Zelnickova, from 1977 to 1992, is only occasionally mentioned in the disclosed documents. However, Donald’s relations, including business ones, with the USSR are ancient: the first trip with Ivana to Moscow and St. Petersburg dates back to 1987. And for 40 years, according to former KGB agents, the Kremlin viewed Trump as a valuable asset for the way it has weakened US institutions.
In any case, there should be a lot more information about the case in a month. Knowing that the right to privacy ends when the data subject dies, Bloomberg requested all archived information about Ivana last summer. The FBI responded by admitting that they had been investigating her based on reports from whistleblowers. The investigation began on February 14, 1989, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the communist regimes, and yielded a 900-page dossier. Federal police initially claimed it took them 5 years to create the documents. The journalists sued the FBI and the court issued an immediate release order. So the first 190 pages arrived yesterday; and a commitment to release another 710 within 30 days, “cleansed” of information that must remain classified.