Paolo Zampolli—the man who introduced President Donald Trump to his wife, Melania—requested that Immigration and Customs Enforcement detain and deport his ex-girlfriend in an effort to win a custody battle over their son, The New York Times reported Friday. Zampolli denies the reporting. When Zampolli, a former modeling agent, found out in June that his ex-wife Amanda Ungaro was in a Miami jail for workplace fraud, he took his chance and called David Venturella, a high-ranking ICE official. Venturella then put in a call to ICE’s Miami headquarters to grab Ungaro before she got out on bail. The Times notes that Venturella emphasized that it was a favor for a friend of the president during the call. Ungaro was later deported. The Times reports that Ungaro may have been deported had her ex not gotten involved, but Zampolli certainly helped speed up the process.Zampolli insists that he wasn’t asking for Ungaro to be deported. “I asked David what was going on because I did not know the process,” he told the Times.This is yet another instance of the cronyism that has come to define the Trump administration. There’s no way civilians should be able to use ICE to send personal shots at other people just because they know the president.
The so-called Blocking Anticompetitive Self-preferencing by Entrenched Dominant Platforms Act (BASED Act) goes after big tech companies that are stomping on young startups.