Melania Trump draws fire over 'awfully strange' photo-op at National Archives

More than a few questions are being raised over an invitation extended to Melania Trump to be featured at a ceremony at the National Archives which is being construed by some critics as a photo-op that could help with Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign.

According to a report from Politico's Michael Schaffer, it is "awfully strange" that Melania is the featured guest at the scheduled naturalization ceremony considering the fraught relationship between the National Archives and Donald Trump, who has been in a protracted battle over stolen documents stored at Mar-a-Lago.

As Schaffer wrote, "How did it happen that a resident of the same Mar-a-Lago estate whose bathrooms were used to store thousands of allegedly ill-gotten Archives documents won an invite to speak in the same room as the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence? For that matter, how is it that a federal agency is giving the spouse of any presidential candidate a star turn in a heart-warming photo-op less than a month before the Iowa caucuses?"

The answer he suggested, is that the Archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan, knows the former first lady from working with her before, with a spokesperson for the archives claiming, "Naturalization ceremonies at the National Archives are not political events, and speakers are not invited in a political capacity."

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That doesn't pass the smell test with one ethics expert.

According to Washington University law professor Kathleen Clark, "I think with an almost religious fervor that it actually is really important to prevent naturalization ceremonies from being exploited for partisan political purposes, or even conducting them in a way for reasonable people to even think they might be connected to partisan political activity."

Richard Painter, the former ethics chief in George W. Bush’s White House, cautioned Melania has to watch what she says, explaining, "She’s got to play by the rules, unlike her husband."

Clark, of Washington University, isn't entirely opposed to the invitation to Melania for the event which will be held on Friday in the archives rotunda, but she questions the timing.

“If the archivist had asked me what my take is, I guess I would say, it’s terrific that you want to invite Melania Trump at some point to be a guest speaker at a naturalization ceremony. And at the same time, even though this three-month blackout period does not apply by its terms, that seems like it’s worth honoring so that there is no question about whether the invitation had any political motive or was intended to provide any political benefit,” she explained. “It’s not that the invitation is unfortunate, but the fact that the invitation comes a month before the Iowa caucuses.”

To which Politico's Schaffer added, "And there’s the pesky matter of the former president’s legal troubles. The charges in the documents case — which include allegations that Trump and his team stonewalled archivists and misled them about what he still had — depict the sort of entitled insider behavior that can be a turn-off even to folks unaware of the intricacies of the United States Presidential Records Act."