Katie Zacharia’s latest approach to handling the scandal around her boosted legal credentials involves pretending the whole thing never happened.
The new White House press secretary told The New York Times Wednesday that she had misinterpreted a reporter’s question earlier this week about where she passed the bar exam. At the time, Zacharia answered: “When I moved to China.” Cue pandemonium.
“I assumed the question was, ‘Where were you after law school?’” Zacharia told the Times in a brief phone call.
“That’s all I could hear over the sound of Marine One,” she continued. “And, wanting to respect protocol, the distance behind the president kept me from moving closer to hear the question.”
The Times did not repeat the original question, or press Zacharia about her credentials.
The 42-year-old obtained her JD from Pepperdine Caruso Law in 2011, according to her LinkedIn profile, but how she built her career after school appears to be legally dubious. For years, Zacharia made a name for herself as a legal expert on conservative airways. Her LinkedIn also lists her as “general counsel” for a California-based organization run by longtime Trump ally Ric Grenell. The caveat: she shouldn’t have been able to do either without passing the bar.
Zacharia told the Times that she had consulted with Pepperdine’s president as to how she should identify herself in the news, and shared that she was warned against using labels such as “attorney” or “esquire,” but that “lawyer” was fine.
After analyzing state bar association databases from all 50 states and Washington, Popular Info’s Judd Legum found that Zacharia never actually passed the qualifying legal exam anywhere in the country. And despite her claim earlier this week, she couldn’t have passed the Chinese equivalent of the bar exam, either, as it’s actually forbidden for foreigners to do so.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Zacharia sat for the California bar exam after she obtained her law degree, but she did not pass.
A watchdog group in the state called for an investigation into Zacharia’s resume on Wednesday, stating that she “repeatedly held herself out to the public as entitled to practice law without a license to do so,” conduct that they noted “California law treats as a crime.”