The White House on Tuesday scrambled to answer questions about the legal credentials of President Donald Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, who made a brief and halting debut in the briefing room and later said she had passed a bar exam in China, a country where noncitizens aren’t allowed to practice in courtrooms.
Trump called Zacharia “an attorney” in his Friday announcement of her appointment, and her LinkedIn profile says she served as general counsel for Fix California, a nonprofit founded by Ric Grenell, a high-profile Trump adviser. Asked Tuesday where she had been admitted to the bar, Zacharia said China — not a U.S. state or the District of Columbia, where one would need to have been admitted to practice law in the United States.
Asked the same question, the White House did not elaborate on whether Zacharia was ever a practicing attorney in the United States. In a statement, the White House said, “Katie moved to China with her husband after graduating because of his job at an American private equity firm while she worked on international transaction law.”
Zacharia has a law degree from Pepperdine University, graduating in 2011, the university confirmed. Independent journalist Judd Legum first reported the questions about her bar admissions, noting that Zacharia had not been admitted to the bar in California.
The questions came after Zacharia made a brief debut to the media on Tuesday, taking just three questions from reporters after reading off a script in a sometimes-stumbling first appearance.
Trump announced Zacharia’s appointment last week, bypassing even his powerful chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to make the decision, according to four people with knowledge of the internal conversations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive White House conversations.
Her first appearance in the briefing room drew mixed reviews from inside the White House.
“I thought she was very good,” Trump told reporters after Tuesday’s briefing as he walked to Marine One en route to a campaign rally in Alaska.
But other White House officials wondered how much she had been able to prepare ahead of the briefing and questioned how long she would last in the role.
Zacharia accompanied the president as he made his way to the helicopter — perhaps a way of showing his support following the brief debut.
Senior White House staff members, including Wiles, were informed of the decision to hire Zacharia the night before Trump announced it on Friday, the people said. Zacharia had little time to prepare for the briefing, which can be a challenging joust with the press in which a press secretary needs to advocate on behalf of the administration, stick to the facts — sometimes — and improvise quickly when tricky topics arise.
“I have wanted to work for him for a very long time,” Zacharia said of Trump, moments after she stepped up to the podium, reading from a thick briefing book as she alternated between staring at its pages and looking up at the reporters in a packed White House briefing room.
In her opening statement — which made up the bulk of the 14-minute appearance in front of the cameras — Zacharia repeatedly praised Trump’s energy and touted the crowd sizes at his rallies, where scores of seats have been unfilled in recent days.
“Attendance is at record highs as enthusiastic, hardworking Americans are lining up and packing arenas to support President Trump and Republicans,” Zacharia said, touching on a topic that has bedeviled Trump’s press secretaries since the first day of his first spokesman’s day on the job.
That spokesman, Sean Spicer, berated journalists for reporting what they had seen about the crowd size at Trump’s inauguration the previous day and said it was the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.” He later expressed regret for that briefing.
Zacharia took questions from three outlets: Breitbart News, Fox News and the Daily Mail, all of which cover news from a conservative perspective. She said she would “have to get back to you on that” in response to a question from Fox about whether the Trump administration had stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine — a somewhat unusual nonresponse on a topic that was prominently featured in the news Tuesday morning.
She did make news with an announcement that the White House had asked for the resignation of the U.S. ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was once the fiancée of Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. Guilfoyle had been embroiled by allegations, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, that she asked for $100,000 from a Republican donor to help pay off her American Express bill.
Zacharia misspoke on one issue close to her heart, referring to “my president” rather than “my husband” as she answered a friendly question about how she planned to balance time with her four young children with the demands of the job. Zacharia and her family have been living in California.
“I love being with my kids. The idea of not spending evenings with my kid is, kids are, is completely unacceptable. So my president, excuse me, my husband — that’s a good one — my husband is out here, is out here for the week because we have two birthdays in our family, and we are very, very protective of celebrating birthdays as a family,” she said.
Trump believes himself to be his own best spokesman and has long sought deputies who would be fierce advocates on the airwaves, embracing those whom he believed were passionate and energetic defenders of his presidency, and sometimes raging at others whom he believed failed to step up.
Zacharia’s predecessor, Karoline Leavitt, worked for Trump for years and was a trusted member of his inner circle. She resigned in August after giving birth to a baby girl, her second child, in May. Zacharia has advocated for Trump policies on Fox and One America News, and she also worked for Truth Social, his social media platform. But she does not have the longtime relationship with the president that Leavitt did.
Immediately after addressing the balance between her family life and her work life — and praising Trump for hiring women with families — Zacharia ended the briefing, declaring that “President Trump is heading out to Marine One for our historic trip to Alaska, and we can ask him all of the questions out there.”
Trump didn’t exit the White House for nearly an hour and a half. The White House press office, meanwhile, put out a video of Zacharia’s careful debut walk from her new office to the briefing room, accompanied by a shredding electric guitar. The video was a notable contrast with a similar one put out by the office of Vice President JD Vance of his walk to the podium last month, in which the vice president appeared relaxed and joked about the reporters as he made his way to the briefing room.
Tuesday’s video also showed that Zacharia hasn’t moved into the large and comfortable West Wing office that Leavitt vacated, which in a building with limited space is often a proxy for influence. That large office is now occupied by White House Communications Director Steven Cheung. Zacharia instead moved into a much smaller space that Leavitt occupied at the start of Trump’s second term.
“Katie is a fabulous and wonderful addition to the team. She is uniquely qualified and whip smart to help inform the American people about all the great things President Trump and his Administration have been doing, and she will do an incredible job as Press Secretary,” Cheung said in a statement.
Nancy Cook, Katherine Doyle, Natalie Allison, Isaac Arnsdorf and Scott Nover contributed to this report.
The post White House scrambles over questions on new press secretary’s background appeared first on Washington Post.
