President Donald Trump’s new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia is defending her self-description as a lawyer, while acknowledging that she took the bar exam and considered the results “inconsequential.”
Zacharia’s legal qualifications have faced growing scrutiny since her debut White House media briefing earlier this week, when shortly afterward she was asked which state she passed the bar exam in and replied: “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’d failed to pass the bar.
Zacharia, who moved to China after earning her law degree in 2011, told Posobiec she had already preregistered for the bar exam before moving to Beijing, where her husband was working at an American private equity firm.
“I didn’t want to withdraw from that,” Zacharia said of the bar exam. “And we knew we would be moving out to China, and I was obviously incredibly distracted and overwhelmed and excited for finally being married to someone who I had been long-distance from for at least a year.”
Zacharia said she thought she’d take the bar and “see what happens.”
“The results are somewhat inconsequential because I knew I wouldn’t need the bar in China, and we left shortly thereafter,” said Zacharia.
The Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday that Zacharia failed California’s bar exam after graduating from Pepperdine University in 2011.
A Business Insider review of records for all 50 states and the District of Columbia found no evidence that Zacharia had been admitted to practice law in the US.
In China, Zacharia said she took a job in the international practice division of the Zhong Lun law firm, where she said she worked on multimillion-dollar shareholder agreements and cross-border transactions. She said she was one of four associates under a senior partner.
“After moving to China, I didn’t really think much of the bar results or consider that something that I needed to focus on,” Zacharia told Posobiec, adding, “There’s no Chinese bar. I had enough credentials, which was my law degree, to be able to do this practice.”
“I had all the necessary requirements to do that, and I was able to do it effectively and well,” she said.
She also said that she never retook the bar exam after returning to the US and having the first of four children with her husband within six years.
Zacharia said she consulted with people within 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 buffer that, you have international legal experience in transactional law,” Zacharia said.
“It’s unfortunate that people dub this as some kind of conspiracy,” she said. “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’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 to advertise yourself as an attorney without a license.
At least two watchdog groups have filed a complaint about Zacharia with the State Bar of California this week.
