The mystery of Katie Zacharia’s legal credentials has finally been solved: She doesn’t have any.
The brand-new White House press secretary appeared on the right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice Thursday for an interview with Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec and attempted to put the whole “lawyer” thing to bed.
“A lot of the misinformation, miscommunication, Jack, is around the fact that I labeled myself ‘lawyer,’” Zacharia said. “I consulted for a very long time, many people in the field, ‘Is it okay and acceptable if I label myself ‘lawyer’—not ‘attorney at law,’ not ‘Katie Zacharia esquire’—but ‘lawyer,’ and provide legal analysis, not legal advice. And they said ‘absolutely’ across the board.”
Zacharia obtained her J.D. from Pepperdine University and took the California state bar exam soon after graduation, but she didn’t pass. She told Posobiec that she was distracted, overwhelmed, and excited by her upcoming marriage and plans to join her new husband in China, so the exam was not top-of-mind.
“We just said, ‘Let’s take this time, and I’ll take the bar and see what happens,” the new press secretary said. “The results are somewhat inconsequential because I knew I wouldn’t need the bar in China and we left shortly thereafter. After moving to China, I didn’t really think much of the bar results as something I needed to focus on…. There’s no Chinese bar, I had enough credentials, which was my law degree, to be able to do this practice.”
The question of Zacharia’s legal background has perplexed pundits after her bizarre response to reporters at the White House Tuesday asking where she had passed the bar exam, to which she answered: “When I moved to China.” Foreigners can’t take the Chinese bar exam. She later told The New York Times that she had misheard the question.
“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 told Posobiec. Never, except when she was repeatedly describing herself as a lawyer and working as “general counsel” for a California nonprofit.