President Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, is defending her own description as a lawyer, while acknowledging that she took the bar exam and considered the results “inconsequential.”
Zacharia’s legal qualifications have come under increasing scrutiny since her first White House press briefing earlier this week, when she was asked shortly after in which state she passed the bar exam and responded, “When I moved to China.”
In an interview Thursday with right-wing provocateur Jack Posobiec on Real America’s Voice, she did not deny reports that she had failed to pass the bar.
Zacharia, who moved to China after earning her law degree in 2011, told Posobiec that she had already pre-registered for the bar exam before moving to Beijing, where her husband worked at a U.S. private equity firm.
“I didn’t want to withdraw,” Zacharia said of taking the bar exam. “And we knew we were going to move to China, and I was obviously incredibly distracted and overwhelmed and excited to finally be married to someone I’d been away from for at least a year.”
Zacharia said she was thinking about taking the bar and “seeing what happens.”
“The results are somewhat inconsequential because I knew I wouldn’t need the bar in China, and we left shortly afterward,” Zacharia said.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday evening that Zacharia failed the California bar exam after graduating from Pepperdine University in 2011.
A review of records from all 50 states and the District of Columbia by Business Insider found no evidence that Zacharia had been admitted to practice law in the United States.
In China, Zacharia said she accepted a position in the international practice division of law firm Zhong Lun, where she said she worked on multimillion-dollar shareholder agreements and cross-border transactions. She said she was one of four partners under a senior partner.
“After moving to China, I didn’t really think about the bar scores or consider it as something I should focus on,” Zacharia told Posobiec, adding, “There is no Chinese bar. I had enough qualifications, meaning my law degree, to be able to do this practice.”
“I had all the necessary conditions to do it and I was able to do it efficiently and well,” she said.
She also said she never took the bar exam again after returning to the United States and having the first of four children with her husband in six years.
Zacharia said she consulted with people in the legal field “for a very long time” and was told it would be acceptable to call herself a lawyer “and provide legal analysis, not legal advice.”
“They said absolutely, absolutely across the board: You can call yourself a lawyer, you have a JD, and to cushion that, you have international legal experience in transactional law,” Zacharia said.
“It’s unfortunate that people are calling this a conspiracy,” she said. “The truth is, I was very careful about how I executed this, and I never felt like I was someone who was a lawyer.”
Zacharia’s LinkedIn page says she served as general counsel for Fix California, a political advocacy group, between January 2024 and March 2025. In California, it is a misdemeanor to practice law or hold yourself out as an attorney without a license.
At least two watchdog groups filed a complaint against Zacharia with the State Bar of California this week.
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