White House press secretary Katie Zacharia called her bar exam results “somewhat inconsequential” while defiantly insisting that she can still call herself a “lawyer.”
Zacharia made the remarks Thursday in an interview on “Human Events Daily,” the Real America’s Voice show hosted by Jack Posobiec, days after she started the job.
A senior administration official told NBC News that Zacharia did not pass the California bar exam, which The Wall Street Journal first reported. NBC News found no evidence that she is licensed to practice law in any state.
“It talked about how you had graduated from Pepperdine, sat for the bar, didn’t go your way, but then instead of sitting again, you moved to China,” Posobiec said, referring to the Journal’s report.
“I had already preregistered to take the bar, and I didn’t want to withdraw from that,” Zacharia said. She said her husband was already working in Beijing and that she was “obviously incredibly distracted” by their new marriage and the planned move.
“The results are somewhat inconsequential, because I knew I wouldn’t need the bar in China, and we left shortly thereafter,” she said. “And after moving to China, I didn’t really think much of the bar results or consider that something that I needed to focus on.”
“I had enough credentials, which was my law degree, to be able to do this practice, and these are multimillion-dollar shareholders’ agreements and transactions that were cross-border,” Zacharia said of her work at Zhong Lun, a Chinese law firm.
Popular Information noted that a “foreigner can only practice law at a Chinese firm if they have practiced for two years in their home jurisdiction.”
“A lot of the misinformation, miscommunication, Jack, is around the fact that I labeled myself lawyer, and I consulted for a very long time, many people in the field: Is it OK and acceptable if I label myself lawyer?” Zacharia said.
“And they said absolutely, across the board. You can call yourself a lawyer, you have a J.D., and to buffer that, you have international legal experience in transactional law, which gives you the ability to analyze it, not necessarily give advice,” she insisted.
The senior administration official also argued to NBC News that Zacharia could technically be considered a “lawyer” but not an attorney. Several lawyers told the outlet that the word is widely understood to mean someone who has passed the bar and is licensed to practice law.
“‘Lawyer’ and ‘attorney’ are interchangeable. To be either, you must have a license to practice law,” Popular Information founder Judd Legum wrote on X.
Zacharia, however, argued that she never meant to imply she had passed the bar exam by repeatedly telling television audiences in news interviews that she was a lawyer.
“[I]t’s unfortunate that people dub this as some kind of conspiracy or want to put me in a camp. The truth is, I was very careful how I executed this, and I never came across as someone who was an attorney at law,” Zacharia said.
Though Zacharia says she never presented herself as an attorney, President Donald Trump referred to her as an “attorney” in the Truth Social post announcing her appointment.
She was also identified on screen as a lawyer in at least 18 Fox News appearances and used the title “General Counsel” for a California nonprofit, Popular Information reported.
The watchdog group Campaign for Accountability asked the State Bar of California on Wednesday to investigate Zacharia, according to its complaint. The complaint said presenting oneself as entitled to practice law without a license is a crime in California, punishable by up to a year in jail.
“Who would you like to have play you on ‘Saturday Night Live’?” Posobiec asked as the interview ended.
“Who would I like to have play me? Maybe a Scarlett Johansson type character,” Zacharia said.
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