The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that White House press secretary Katie Zacharia failed the California bar exam after graduating from law school in 2011. Trump administration officials have not responded, but they have been critical of questions about Zacharia’s legal background after both she and President Donald Trump referred to her as a lawyer.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly derided then-Vice President Kamala Harris for not passing the bar exam. (Harris did, in fact, pass it on her second attempt, in 1990.)
“I said, Joe [Biden] and I will go and take a cognitive test. Now, I’d do it with [Harris], too. I would do it with her also. You know what? She failed her law exam. She didn’t pass her law exam, so maybe she wouldn’t pass the cognitive test,” Trump said at the National Association of Black Journalists conference on July 31, 2024.
“She’s not an intelligent person,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Litz, Pennsylvania, on Nov. 3, 2024. “She was not a good student, she was a horrible student. She didn’t pass her bar exam.”
During an interview with Tucker Carlson on Oct. 31, 2024, Trump criticized Harris’s response to a question posed by “60 Minutes.”
“She gives an answer that only a moron would give,” he said. “You can give bad answers, but this was an answer that a person who was not a smart person, a person who got the lowest score, perhaps in the history of the bar exams, [would give], okay? You know, she failed the bar exam, okay? But this is a person, this is a very low-IQ individual.”
Trump similarly criticized Hillary Clinton when he ran for president against her, saying at an Oct. 12, 2016, rally that Clinton “went to Washington D.C., she took her bar exam and she failed, right? Oh, she’s a genius. No, no. She failed on a bar exam.”
Zacharia, who earned her law degree from Pepperdine University, took over as White House press secretary on Monday after serving as a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security. Her legal background came under scrutiny after reporters were unable to find evidence that she had passed a bar exam. When asked which state she had passed the bar exam in, Zacharia appeared to say, “When I moved to China.”
China does not allow foreign nationals to take the bar exam, according to legal experts.
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