I couldn’t think what to say about this beyond simply reposting the first two grafs of this Washington Post article …
The White House on Tuesday scrambled to answer questions about the legal credentials of President Donald Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, who made a brief and halting debut in the briefing room and later said she had passed a bar exam in China, a country where noncitizens aren’t allowed to practice in courtrooms.
Trump called Zacharia “an attorney” in his Friday announcement of her appointment, and her LinkedIn profile says she served as general counsel for Fix California, a nonprofit founded by Ric Grenell, a high-profile Trump adviser. Asked Tuesday where she had been admitted to the bar, Zacharia said China — not a U.S. state or D.C., where one would need to have been admitted to practice law in the United States.
I saw some of that “halting debut,” and that’s an understatement. But we’ll get to that in a moment. I’ve seldom seen so much of the nonsense of Trumpism and the MAGA milieu packed into two short grafs. Is this China thing even true? If noncitizens aren’t allowed to practice in courtrooms, I assume that means they can still pass the bar and function as attorneys outside courtrooms? Plenty of attorneys in the U.S. have never set foot in a courtroom. But again, is this even true? And how was she a general counsel in the U.S. without passing a bar exam? The Post article says that Zacharia graduated with a law degree from Pepperdine in 2011 and then includes this statement from the White House: “Katie moved to China with her husband after graduating because of his job at an American private equity firm while she worked on international transaction law.”
I would assume a Chinese bar exam is administered in Chinese and in Chinese characters. Does Zacharia know Mandarin? And can she read Mandarin? I would assume that Chinese law is fairly different from U.S. law, though people usually have to study for the bar exam even after law school. So maybe she crammed and passed? I guess all these things are possible.
This (paywalled) article from three days ago in the South China Morning Post includes some key details. Zacharia appears to have lived in Beijing from 2011 to 2013 “where she worked as an associate on the international practice team at Zhong Lun, one of China’s leading commercial law firms.” But the Post seems to have gotten that detail from Zacharia’s LinkedIn profile, so let’s keep some level of question mark on that.
As for her language skills, the Post says this …
She reportedly knows enough basic Chinese to occasionally interject in a conversation and catch people off guard. Available descriptions characterise her level as basic, rather than suggesting that she can conduct complex diplomatic or legal discussions in Chinese.
It certainly doesn’t sound like Zacharia knows Mandarin well enough to pass the bar in China if a bar exam is broadly like it is in the U.S., though maybe it’s different. (Can’t say it’s a subject I’d given much thought to.) Zacharia at least seems to have worked at a Chinese firm. But one imagines that she might have been hired as an American with a law degree who could help with international transactions rather than someone who was going to practice law in China.
Back to the “halting” debut.
When I was watching Zacharia’s performance this morning it occurred to me that we might be looking at another Scaramucci-type situation. Her presentation was stumbling, awkward, cringey. Obviously she’s coming after Karoline Leavitt, not an impressive predecessor. But it’s important to remember that for what Trump wanted, Leavitt was actually quite solid. Trump wanted a worshipful, hot blonde who would troll the White House press corps on his behalf every day. She did a solid job of that. She also had a rep for being very responsive to reporters with quotes and comments, notwithstanding the on-air trash talk. Zacharia seems more likely to embarrass Trump. And he won’t have a lot of tolerance for that.
It will be interesting to see what comes out about this in the next 24 hours.