A Mole In The First Family
Narrativ has revealed how Melania and Donald Trump's closest friend, Paolo Zampolli, is connected to a Russian influence operation. Learn how you can watch the live interview with Amanda Ungaro.
There has never been a scandal like this involving a First Lady of the United States.
For thirty years, Paolo Zampolli has stood exactly where you would place a man if you wanted eyes inside an American family. He is the modeling agent who brought Melania Knauss to New York in 1996 and, by his own account and hers, introduced her to Donald Trump. He and his partner were fixtures at Trump's table — inauguration night, Christmas after Christmas, the only other couple seated with the family at Mar-a-Lago. And he is, according to the woman who lived with him for twenty years, texting Melania Trump to this day.
For a man whose career began booking fashion models, Zampolli has come a very long way.
He is also, on the evidence of his own emails, a man who spent those same thirty years working the Russians.
The emails were kept by his former partner, Amanda Ungaro, and forwarded to Narativ — sixty-seven of them, the originals intact. Read alongside the Epstein files, they describe something there is no polite word for: a foreign-cultivated fixer, embedded in the First Family, for decades.
The record, plainly:
Churkin. Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, attended Zampolli's birthday party and toasted him on camera. Zampolli wrote to Churkin's private Gmail — and six days after Russia annexed Crimea, his entire message was one word: “FANTASTIC.”
The same channel as Trump and Epstein. Churkin is the diplomat who, according to Luke Harding's reporting, helped arrange Trump's first trip to Moscow in 1987 — and the man Jeffrey Epstein, in his own files, boasted he had “coached” on how to handle Donald Trump. Three men, one Kremlin conduit.
Lavrov. Zampolli wrote directly to Vladimir Voronkov, the Russian who runs U.N. counter-terrorism, in intimate Russian. And Epstein named Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as the man who could reconnect him to Vladimir Putin after Churkin died.
The women. Zampolli placed Russian models into United Nations roles — women with documented ties to Moscow, including one who has claimed Putin fathered her child.
The Russia-backed man in the room. Also toasting Zampolli at that party: Vuk Jeremic, the Russia-backed president of the U.N. General Assembly.
The passports. Zampolli represented a Caribbean island, Dominica — though he is Italian — and was known, Ungaro says, for peddling fraudulent diplomatic passports at $250,000 each.
The immunity. Those credentials carried diplomatic immunity. Today he holds a United States government title — Special Envoy for Global Partnerships — that skipped the FBI background check and Senate confirmation entirely.
Then the sequence that should stop everyone cold. Months ago, after Zampolli called a senior official at ICE, Ungaro was arrested and deported to Brazil; the New York Times reported her case had been flagged as important to “someone close to the White House.” It happened as she was signaling she was ready to talk — and not long before Melania Trump's own extraordinary, unscheduled press conference, the one where the First Lady denied everything. Now, from exile, Ungaro is reading back through the Zampolli archive whose meaning is only beginning to come clear: the ties to Churkin and Lavrov, the ties to Epstein, the ties to Trump.
How does a man reach into a federal enforcement agency and have the mother of his child removed from the country in the middle of a custody fight? Zampolli holds a United States government title. He picked up the phone to a senior ICE official. Weeks later she was on a plane to Brazil. Why did ICE act on the word of a special envoy in a private family dispute — and who told the agency the case mattered to the White House?
This is not a story about the past. It is a live national security problem, and the questions do not wait for Monday. Was Melania Trump's office infiltrated? Was the White House compromised? Is there a Kremlin back channel running through the First Lady of the United States? Who vetted the man sitting inside her family — and why did no one warn her that her closest friend of thirty years carried a thirty-year Russian record? Why is a man with that record being sent on diplomatically sensitive missions abroad, arriving in Budapest at the side of the Vice President of the United States for the initial Iranian “peace” deal negotiations? And why, of all the people in America, was Paolo Zampolli given the job at all?
Amanda Ungaro sits down with Zev live on Narativ Live, Monday at 7PM ET.
She says she has not released all that she has.
Read the full investigation:
The Spy at the First Lady's Side
Paolo Zampolli was holding court in early April 2013 at his birthday party at the boisterous Provocateur nightclub in Manhattan's swishy Meatpacking District. Zampolli feted guests that spanned the world of international diplomacy and modelling, yet none was more important to the modeling agent turned international diplomat than Vitaly Churkin.
Melania's Shadow: Who Is Paolo Zampolli?
For twenty years, Paolo Zampolli has stood just outside the spotlight — scouting models, arranging visas, slipping in and out of the Trump orbit, and holding a diplomatic title that opens doors. He’s the man who brought Melania Knauss to America, the friend she texts “all the time,” and the diplomat who, this spring, used his government credentials to deport the mother of his own son while Melania Trump watched from the White House.
Great report Zev
I definately plan to watch this interview Zev. Thank you in advance, and for ALL the great interviews you set up.