White House Katie Zacharia opened up on Thursday about a recent controversy surrounding her resumé as the media tries to spin it into a scandal, claiming she lied about being an “attorney.”
We have not found evidence that Zacharia has ever presented herself as a practicing attorney.
Still, immediately after her first press briefing on Tuesday, the knives were out, with the left-wing media smearing her for her performance and questioning whether she is indeed a lawyer.
CNN quickly published a story with the headline, “Katie Zacharia presented herself as a lawyer. She’s not.”
CNN and other left-wing outlets have been losing it ever since, claiming she lied about being a lawyer.
However, the term lawyer is often used as a broad term for someone who earned their Juris Doctor (JD) degree, while an attorney is a lawyer who has passed the bar exam and is licensed to practice. In simple terms, a lawyer is someone who has studied law and earned a degree, and an attorney is licensed to practice law. It’s a square-versus-rectangle debate that the media is sensationalizing.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Zacharia sat for the bar exam in 2011, all while planning a wedding and planning a move to China with her soon-to-be husband, but did not pass.
CNN reports that “Zacharia said in a statement she had ‘practiced international transactional law, with all the appropriate credentials.’ She told the New York Times that she consulted with Pepperdine’s president about how to identify herself, and that she was told not to use ‘attorney’ or ‘esquire,’ but that ‘lawyer’ was OK.”
Likewise, she told Real America’s Voice’s Jack Posobiec during an interview on Thursday, “I consulted, for a very long time, many people in the field: Is it okay and acceptable if I label myself lawyer, not attorney at law, not Katie Zachariah Esquire, but lawyer, and provide legal analysis, not legal advice?”
“And they said 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, which gives you the ability to analyze it, not necessarily give advice, and so that’s where a lot of this discussion has come from,” she continued.
“It’s unfortunate that people dub this as some kind of conspiracy or want to put me in a camp. The truth is, I was very careful how I executed this, and I never came across as someone who was an attorney at law.”
Asked whether she would weigh in on legal matters in the White House or provide legal consultation to President Trump, Zacharia responded, “No, no. For the press secretary, my job is to amplify and communicate his message and to interact with the press and build relationships and strengthen relationships and communicate clearly the message of the administration, and I only intend to do that.”
“I’m not being hired as White House counsel, and that’s the long and the short of that.”
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