The New Press Secretary Says She's a Lawyer. Where's the License?
New White House press secretary Katie Zacharia has long called herself a lawyer. Bar records show no license in any state, and experts say she could not have passed China's bar.
The new White House press secretary has a law degree. What she has not shown anyone is a law license, and that gap has turned her first week on the job into a story about her instead of the president's agenda.
Katie Zacharia has long described herself as a lawyer, including in years of appearances as a commentator on outlets like Fox News and Newsmax, the Associated Press reported. President Trump described her as an attorney when he announced her appointment last week, according to the BBC.
"When I moved to China"
The trouble started Tuesday, Oct. 13. After her first briefing, which The Guardian described as shaky and widely panned, a reporter asked Trump in which state Zacharia had passed the bar exam. The president turned to her and asked, "Which state?" She answered, "When I moved to China."
The question followed a report by the independent outlet Popular Information that she did not appear to be licensed in any state, the AP reported.
Here is what is established. Pepperdine University confirmed she earned a law degree from its law school in 2011. The State Bar of California told CNN it "has no record" of her having been licensed to practice law in California. Snopes said it searched lawyer directories for all 50 states and Washington, D.C., and found no evidence she is admitted in any of them.
The Wall Street Journal reported that she took the California bar exam after law school and did not pass, according to the BBC. She then moved to Beijing, where her LinkedIn profile says she was an associate at Zhong Lun Law Firm from 2011 to 2013. But in China, only Chinese citizens can be licensed to practice law, the BBC noted. "There's no possibility that she passed the Chinese bar exam, ever," John Ohnesorge, a Chinese law expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Snopes.
Her side
Zacharia has defended herself. "I practiced international transaction law, with all the appropriate credentials," she said in a statement. She told The New York Times that when she began appearing on cable news, Pepperdine's president advised her she could call herself a lawyer but not an attorney, the BBC reported.
White House communications director Steven Cheung called her "uniquely qualified and whip smart to help inform the American people."
A watchdog group, Campaign for Accountability, filed a complaint Wednesday, the AP reported, asking the California State Bar to investigate whether she held herself out as entitled to practice law without a license, which California law treats as a crime. No finding has been made, and the complaint is only an allegation.
Small words, big trust
Some will say this is a technicality. Lots of people with law degrees never practice. A press secretary does not need a bar card to stand at a podium. All true.
But the job of a press secretary is to speak for the president and be believed. When the person behind the podium cannot give a straight answer about her own résumé, every answer after that gets weighed a little lighter. That is a bad trade for an administration that wants the public to trust it over a press corps it has openly fought with. Dock Line argued this week that conservatives should mind the principle in that fight. Credibility is the principle.
Scripture is plain that small truths matter. "He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much: and he that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much," Jesus said in Luke 16:10. And Proverbs 12:22 says, "Lying lips are abomination to the LORD: but they that deal truly are his delight."
No one has shown Zacharia set out to deceive anyone, and her account of Pepperdine's advice deserves a fair hearing. But "lawyer" means something to ordinary people. If she is not licensed anywhere, the honest fix is simple: say so plainly, stop using the title and get back to work. That would end the story faster than any statement about "appropriate credentials."
As this magazine said about another administration appointee this week, integrity has to cut both ways.
Hero photo: Kellerbn via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5, cropped and resized.
