New White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia acknowledged on Thursday that she had failed the bar exam, a prerequisite for practising law in the United States, as her credentials face scrutiny.
Zacharia has described herself as a lawyer during television appearances and on social media, and listed herself as general counsel of a California-based conservative nonprofit.
But the legal credentials of the press secretary, who President Donald Trump appointed last week, were called into question after she gave an inconclusive answer about where she had passed the bar exam.
The 41-year-old graduated from Pepperdine University’s law school in 2011, but obtaining a law degree does not automatically qualify someone to practice law.
In a Fox News interview on Thursday, host Sean Hannity asked Zacharia: “You took the bar exam, but you didn’t pass the bar exam, correct?”
“Yes,” she responded.
In a separate interview with conservative media outlet Real America’s Voice on Thursday, Zacharia said she had registered to take the bar exam but was “distracted and overwhelmed” by plans to move to China with her husband.
“The results are somewhat inconsequential because I knew I wouldn’t need the bar in China,” she said.
Foreign nationals cannot sit China’s bar exam, although they can undertake certain legal work at Chinese law firms.
Hannity later asked Zacharia if she had ever taken the bar exam a second time, to which she said: “I did not.
“I had four kids in six years,” she said. “It was never my intent to go into the practice of law.”
Zacharia said on Real America’s Voice that “many people in the field” had assured her that she could “label myself a lawyer,” given her law degree and experience in business law gained in China, where she worked at a Beijing law firm. She added that she could “provide legal analysis, not legal advice”.
“I was very careful how I executed this.”
The Campaign for Accountability, a political ethics organisation, called on Wednesday for the California Bar Association to launch an investigation.
“In California, calling yourself a lawyer without a license isn’t puffery; it’s a crime,” the organisation said in a press release.
Zacharia held her first White House press briefing on Tuesday with an unusually short press conference, answering questions from only three journalists.
She succeeds Karoline Leavitt, a loyal Trump supporter and often combative press secretary, who stepped down in August to care for her young children.