Katie Zacharia has finally come clean about her legal pedigree.
The new White House press secretary, 41, admitted in her first interview in the job that she flunked the bar exam—blaming being “overwhelmed” by her long-distance relationship—but she thought it was OK to keep calling herself a lawyer.
Zacharia broke down her legal background in an interview with Real America’s Voice on Thursday after being hounded by questions over her repeated claims of being a lawyer. Hours before the interview, The Wall Street Journal reported that she took the California bar exam in 2011 but didn’t pass.
Crucial to the story, Zacharia explained, was her long-distance relationship with her husband Tyler. He had been working for an American private equity firm in Beijing, China, while she was attending law school at Pepperdine University in California.
“I had already pre-registered to take the bar and I didn’t wanna withdraw from that. And we knew we would be moving out to China,” she told Jack Posobiec, a right-wing conspiracy theorist turned conservative pundit.
“And I was obviously incredibly distracted and overwhelmed and excited for finally being married to someone who had been long-distance from for at least a year and a half, when you include the engagement,” she continued. “And we just said, ‘Let’s take this time and I’ll take the bar and see what happens.’ The results are somewhat inconsequential because I knew I wouldn’t need the bar in China. And we left shortly thereafter.”
Zacharia moved to China in 2011 and lived there until 2013. During that period, she worked as an associate on the international practice team for the elite law firm Zhong Lun, according to her LinkedIn page.
“After moving to China, I think I didn’t really think much of the bar results or consider that something that I needed to focus on,” she said, explaining that she worked for the English-language side of the law firm alongside a Chinese counterpart.
“There’s no Chinese bar. I had enough credentials, which was my law degree, to be able to do this practice,” she said. “And these were multimillion-dollar shareholders agreements and transactions that were cross-border. I had all the necessary requirements to do that. And I was able to do it effectively and well and had glowing recommendations from the senior partner who oversaw my time there.”
Gary Gao, a partner at Zhong Lun, told The New York Times that Zacharia’s role at the firm closely resembled that of a paid internship.
The couple decided to move back to the U.S. after getting pregnant with the first of their four young children.
“A lot of the misinformation, miscommunication, Jack, is around the fact that I labeled myself ‘lawyer,’” she admitted.
But Zacharia wasted no time pointing fingers at her peers.
“I consulted, for a very long time, many people in the field, ‘Is it OK and acceptable if I label myself lawyer, not attorney at law, not Katie Zacharia Esq., but lawyer and provide legal analysis, not legal advice?’” she recalled.
“And they said, ‘Absolutely,’ across the board. ‘You can call yourself a lawyer, you have a JD, and to buffer that, you have international legal experience in transactional law, which gives you the ability to analyze it, not necessarily give advice.’ And so that’s where a lot of this discussion has come from.”
She also accused critics of portraying the fiasco “as some kind of conspiracy,” insisting that, “The truth is I was very careful how I executed this and I never came across as someone who was an attorney at law.”
One of the many people who incorrectly thought Zacharia was an attorney was her own boss, President Donald Trump.
In a Truth Social post last week announcing his appointment of Zacharia as press secretary, Trump called her “a distinguished Graduate of Pepperdine University, and the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, an attorney, and a frequent Commentator on outlets, including Fox News and Newsmax.”
But Zacharia’s story unraveled after Popular Information’s Judd Legum dug into her background and found no evidence that she passed the bar or was admitted to practice law in any state.
When asked on Tuesday where she passed the bar exam, Zacharia twice replied, “When I moved to China.” She later told The Times that she had simply misheard the question over the roar of Marine One and assumed she was asked where she went after law school.
The bizarre saga led watchdog Campaign for Accountability to ask the State Bar of California to investigate Zacharia for potentially violating sections of the California Business and Professions Code that bar people from practicing law without an active license.
“Ms. Zacharia now speaks for the President of the United States from the White House podium. She has relied on her legal pedigree to give her credibility both in that role and to her statements as a television legal commentator,” the group said. “The public is entitled to rely on the representation that a person who calls herself a lawyer is in fact licensed to practice law.”
