Katie Zachariah, newly appointed White House press secretary by President Donald Trump, has become embroiled in a controversy over her legal credentials. Zachariah presented herself as a lawyer in newspapers, television appearances and on social media before being tapped for the post, but she has not passed a bar exam.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the 15th that Zachariah took the California bar exam after graduating from Pepperdine University School of Law in 2011 and failed. The Washington Post reported that she had effectively acknowledged failing the bar exam and had taken the position that the results were not particularly important.
According to U.S. media reports that day, Zachariah said in an interview with the conservative outlet Real America's Voice that she had registered to sit for the bar exam but then moved to China with her husband, and did not want to cancel the test. "The results were not very important, because I knew I would not need a law license in China," she said.
In the United States, lawyers must pass a state bar exam to practice. The California exam has a relatively low pass rate, with only about 31% of test-takers passing in February.
After law school, Zachariah lived in Beijing until 2013 and worked on the international legal team at Zhong Lun, a large Chinese law firm. One person familiar with the matter said she was one of four associates on the international practice team who drafted contracts for cross-border deals worth millions of dollars and handled communications with U.S. and multinational corporate clients. "Strictly speaking, they were international legal consultants, and legal advice was handled by local Chinese lawyers," the person said.
Zachariah, who was criticized as underprepared at her first briefing on the 13th, is now expected to face fallout over remarks disparaging China.
According to Bloomberg and other outlets, she referred to her time living in China on the 15th during an interview with conservative commentator Jack Posobiec, in response to a question about balancing personal life and professional responsibilities.
"President Trump's victory in the 2016 election put America back on the path to being a great nation again," she said. "I had just come back from China at the time, so I thought, how could China be a candidate for superpower status when it didn't even have proper toilets?"