'Illegals'? Trump Corp Employee Jumps The Visa Line

A congressman intervened to help former President Donald Trump’s social media company jump the line for a difficult-to-obtain foreign-worker visa to bring a company executive to the U.S., according to interviews and records reviewed by ProPublica.

A former staffer for Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, said the congressman personally instructed her to help Trump Media, even though she thought it was inappropriate to mix politics with the office’s constituent services duties.

“I specifically did not want to do this,” Bacon’s former director of special projects, Makenzie Cartwright, told ProPublica when asked about emails showing the lawmaker’s intervention. “It was specifically the congressman that suggested I needed to deal with it.”

“Thank you so much for your help on making sure we push this forward,” the company’s chief operating officer wrote to another Bacon staffer in January 2022, according to an email reviewed by ProPublica. “I will make sure to thank the congressman as well!”

Trump Media, which now accounts for roughly half of Trump’s net worth, presents conflicts of interests for the former president, according to ethics experts. While there have been concerns about donors and special interests seeking to curry favor with the Republican candidate for president, this is the first known instance of a politician helping Trump in a private matter involving his social media business.

And it shows that as Trump has presented himself as an immigration hawk, his company has sought special treatment to bring its own foreign executive to the United States.

His administration generally pushed U.S. companies to hire Americans over foreign workers and instituted policies that made it harder to secure visas for skilled workers. Trump’s current platform pledges to “strengthen Buy American and Hire American Policies.”

Trump Media’s relationship with the executive, a software developer in North Macedonia, began in part because American candidates for the same work were more expensive, according to a person involved.

Dan Berger, an immigration attorney who handles such cases, called Trump Media’s hiring of a foreign worker “hypocritical.”

“It got harder in every way possible,” he said of the visa cases he handled during the Trump administration. “It was just one thing after another.”

Before Trump Media reached out to Bacon’s office, the company had already helped get the executive, Vladimir Novachki, approved for the visa. But a backlog at the American embassy in the Balkan nation was causing severe delays in scheduling interviews for Macedonians to finalize the process.

Bacon’s office helped fix the problem for Trump’s company, according to the person involved. Last year, Novachki, who had moved to Florida, was named Trump Media’s chief technology officer.

Bacon’s intervention on behalf of Trump’s company came at the same time Trump was talking publicly about recruiting a primary challenger against the moderate Republican congressman.

“Is there favoritism being extended to the potential president?” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer. “Was there some sort of concern of what happens if you don’t make the call?”

“It’s a classic conflict of interest,” she said.

It’s common for companies to ask members of Congress to help speed along such applications. But they typically do so when the applicant or company is based in the lawmaker’s district. Trump Media, headquartered in Sarasota, Florida, is far outside of Bacon’s Nebraska district.

In response to questions from ProPublica, Bacon’s spokesperson said the office was barred from discussing the details of the case because of privacy concerns, but said Trump Media was not given special treatment. The request, the spokesperson said, came from a Trump Media employee who lived in Bacon’s district.

“This case was not treated any differently than the hundreds of cases we process every year” at multiple federal agencies, the spokesperson said. “Politics don’t come into play for official congressional work.”

A spokesperson for Trump Media declined to answer detailed questions but said in a statement: “ProPublica has grotesquely manufactured this hit piece by fabricating statements, misusing stolen communications containing our employee’s private information, and maliciously insinuating wrongdoing where categorically none exists.”

The hiring of a foreign chief technology officer is part of a larger effort by Trump’s company to source labor abroad, interviews and records show. Trump Media has contracted with a foreign outsourcing firm, according to invoices, and multiple people based abroad list jobs at Trump’s company on their LinkedIn profiles, even as Trump has promised to “stop outsourcing” and “punish” companies that send jobs overseas.

A Trump campaign spokesperson said in a statement that “when President Trump is back in the White House, he will enforce our immigration laws and deport illegal immigrants.” The spokesperson added that “Trump has always been in favor of allowing in thoroughly vetted highly skilled immigrants who do not undercut American wages.”

A lawyer for Trump Media sent ProPublica a letter threatening a lawsuit and accusing the outlet of intending “to publish yet another hit piece on the company that includes false, misleading, and defamatory statements.”

Novachki got his start coding in grade school when he came across a textbook that taught basic concepts without requiring access to the internet. He went on to develop an app, called Skopje Taximeter, that allowed residents of North Macedonia’s capital city to use their smartphones to track their own cab fares.

But his biggest break came when he got a job at Cosmic Development, a Canadian IT and tech outsourcing company with offices in North Macedonia. The firm was co-founded by Chris Pavlovski, who also started the video platform Rumble, which has become a popular alternative to YouTube among American conservatives and which partners with Trump Media. Novachki quickly rose through the ranks.

As a Cosmic employee, Novachki, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, began working with Trump’s company in its early days. Pavlovski recommended him as someone who could build a prototype of the company’s Truth Social platform cheaper than American bidders, according to a person with knowledge of the process.

Trump Media and Novachki applied for a visa reserved for those with “extraordinary ability” in their fields, known as an O-1.

The Department of Homeland Security had approved his application, but before he and his family could come to the United States, they needed an appointment with the American embassy in North Macedonia to finalize the process. In January 2022, emails show, the embassy notified Novachki that his interview was scheduled for December 2023.

But Trump Media wanted Novachki in Florida sooner: “It is extremely important for Vlad to be in the United States so he can work side-by-side [with] other high-level technology executives to ensure our product and tech stack functions well,” one of its executives wrote in an email at the time.

One of Trump Media’s executives, Andrew Northwall, a Nebraska political consultant, reached out to Bacon’s office.

An aide to the congressman replied promptly, assuring the former president’s company that Bacon’s office would get to work: “We will follow up with the proper officials about your concerns.”

The request from the former president’s company came at a delicate moment in Bacon and Trump’s relationship. Bacon had supported Trump in both his presidential campaigns up until that point. But he was also willing to buck his own party at times, criticizing Trump’s actions during the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, for example, and voting for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill.

That vote prompted Trump to release a statement in January 2022 raising the specter of a primary challenge against Bacon that year: “Anyone want to run for Congress against Don Bacon in Nebraska?”

The emails from Trump’s company asking for help from Bacon’s office came a couple weeks later. Canter, the ethics expert, said the timing made the request more troubling, potentially increasing the pressure on Bacon to help. (No significant primary challenger materialized, but Trump did not support Bacon in his race.)

Records show Bacon’s office quickly went into motion, gathering the forms and rationales it would need to push the case forward with the State Department.

When ProPublica first reached out to Cartwright, Bacon’s former director of special projects, she initially said she had only a faint recollection about the case. She called back hours later unsolicited and in a brief conversation shared some details about her role. She recalled that someone had called the congressman to ask for his intervention and that the request was not treated like typical pleas for help from constituents.

“It was higher-level than your average Joe,” she said.

Cartwright did not say if she told Bacon or anyone else that she thought it was inappropriate for her to work on the request. She asked that the article not include her name, but ProPublica did not agree to that request.

The next day, a spokesperson for Bacon reached out to ProPublica and accused a reporter of harassing the former aide and of misrepresenting her statements about the Trump Media visa: “Ms. Cartwright has informed us she didn’t say this to you and that you twisted/misrepresented her words.”

Asked about that claim, Cartwright said in a text message “you misrepresented what I said” and said she worked hundreds of cases at Bacon’s office and all of them were “via the direction of Mr. Bacon, as we have been directed to help constituents.”

In his letter to ProPublica, the Trump Media lawyer said the company “utilized standard constituent services, offered and performed by every member of Congress to obtain legislative assistance in connection with Mr. Novachki’s visa application.” The letter added that portraying the company as “having acted inappropriately” would be “categorically false” and “defamatory.”

If Trump is elected again, not only would his companies potentially get an inside edge in influencing the government to further their interests, but ethics experts have also warned that his more than $2 billion stake in Trump Media could become a path to influencing him. Advertisers, vendors or investors who have political agendas could be in a position to use the social media enterprise to get favorable treatment.

Last month, ProPublica reported that the company quietly entered into a business deal with a major Republican donor who has interests before the federal government.

The Trump administration was sometimes hostile to the various types of visas reserved for skilled foreigners. Immigration lawyers complained during his term that visas with subjective criteria, such as the O-1, became more challenging to obtain. Vetting of an applicant’s acclaim in their field got more vigorous, they said. The Trump administration also stopped deferring to prior approvals for applicants looking to extend their visas.

Most significantly, in 2020 amid the pandemic, Trump enacted restrictions blocking entry to people seeking O-1 and similar visas. The Trump administration said the moves were made to slow the spread of the virus and protect Americans jobs during uncertain times, but immigration advocates alleged the administration was using the pandemic as a pretext to crack down on legal immigration.

Trump has at times expressed more openness to skilled immigrants. A couple months ago, for example, Trump said during a podcast hosted by Silicon Valley venture capitalists that he would allow foreign students at American universities to stay after they graduate.

Trump Media’s reliance on labor from abroad extends beyond Novachki. ProPublica obtained an invoice showing at least one other employee working for Trump Media through the foreign outsourcing firm Cosmic. The LinkedIn pages of five other people, who describe themselves as based in the Balkans, mention working for Trump Media in tasks including software engineering and customer support.

Cosmic did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump in the past has been accused of straying from his immigration platform in his own affairs.

Earlier this year, the Associated Press reported that Trump Media had successfully applied for an H-1B visa, a more common visa generally reserved for those who have specific degrees. The company told reporters at the time that the application was made by prior management and that current management “swiftly terminated the process” when it learned of it.

And Melania Trump, after she had married Donald Trump, sponsored her mother’s application to immigrate from Slovenia and get permanent residency in the U.S. Trump has criticized this so-called “chain migration” — immigrants applying to have their relatives follow them into the country.

“CHAIN MIGRATION must end now!” he once tweeted. “Some people come in, and they bring their whole family with them, who can be truly evil. NOT ACCEPTABLE!”