Daniel Wolfram
Trump’s new press secretary has repeatedly as a lawyer and attorney. A new report shows that is not quite the truth.
President Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia had a disastrous start on her first day on the job.
She had trouble reading and speaking her prepared remarks, and she ended the press conference, the first in months, after just 14 minutes and three questions.
Trump was undeterred. He claimed afterwards that she was a very good choice and had vetted her personally because of her background as a lawyer. There is just one problem: she is not.
Zacharia flunked the bar exam
Katie Zacharia never actually passed the bar exam. That surprising detail came to light after The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported last night that she flunked her legal licensing test at Pepperdine University in 2011, shortly after finishing law school.
A person has to be able to pass the bar examination before they actually are licensed to practice law in America.
Doubts about Zacharia’s credentials and whether she was a licensed attorney were first raised by the independent journalist Judd Legum in his Substack called Popular Information.
Dodging the questions
The story was quickly picked up by the mainstream media, who posed the question to her right after she finished her first press conference. When a journalist asked which state she qualified in, Zacharia replied, “When I moved to China.” Her follow-up statement still dodged the question: “I practiced international transaction law, with all the appropriate credentials.”
She moved to China with her husband right after she graduated. There, she joined the Zhong Lun Law Firm in Beijing as an associate, working without an active license.
A source told WSJ that colleagues advised her she could offer legal analysis based on her law degree and cross-border deals. However, Trump has referred to her as a lawyer when describing why he hired her.
Hired because of her law degree
When she moved back home, Zacharia started referring to herself as a lawyer. When she went on Fox News to discuss a high-profile prosecution, Zacharia stated, “As a lawyer, the procedural steps are absolutely critical to ensure that they get this right.”
Fox News also labeled her an attorney in on-screen chyrons, and Donald Trump echoed that description on Truth Social when announcing her as Karoline Leavitt’s replacement.
There can be criminal consequences if a person falsely identify as a lawyer in some states. That does not seem to concern the White House.
Standing firmly by the appointment, Communications Director Steven Cheung told The Daily Beast that Zacharia “is a fabulous and wonderful addition to the team.”
What is the definition of a lawyer?
Zacharia did pass the a law examination that is supposed to measure a law student’s knowledge of established standards of professional conduct, which tests legal ethics. But that is where her official legal credentials stop.
Legal experts disagree on the degree to which a person is considered a lawyer. Most experts agree that you are not officially an attorney-at-law until you pass the bar exam, but you are allowed to work in some capacity with just a law degree.
Her former Pepperdine law professor Robert Pushaw described her to the WSJ as “a good law student and a genuinely good person.” He did not refer to her as a lawyer in the interview.
Zacharia tried to clarify her remarks to The New York Times after claiming she passed the bar exam in China. “I assumed the question was, ‘Where were you after law school?’” she said. “That’s all I could hear over the sound of Marine One,” Zacharia added, “and wanting to respect protocol, the distance behind the president kept me from moving closer to hear the question.”
