“Did anyone vet her?” one Trump adviser asked about Katie Zacharia, CNN reported. According to multiple White House officials and advisers, the answer was no. Zacharia lasted five days as White House press secretary before Trump pushed her out Friday over her shaky first briefing and her claim to be a lawyer, even though she never passed the bar.
Late Friday she posted that it “was an honor to work for” Trump, calling him “such a kind, wonderful, gracious, thoughtful, enthusiastic, and hardworking man,” NBC News reported. The White House says she’s moving to “a new role that will be announced at a later date.”
How did Katie Zacharia get hired without being vetted?
Fast, and mostly off TV. A week before she got the job, she wasn’t on anyone’s list, CNN reported. Trump was frustrated that few people were defending him on air and asked advisers, including chief of staff Susie Wiles, “What about Katie?” Trump aide Natalie Harp was among her boosters, according to a summary of the CNN and Politico reporting.
She’d been a conservative TV commentator and, since June, a communications adviser at Trump Media, the company behind Truth Social. Trump later called her record “unblemished.”
What did Katie Zacharia say that wasn’t true?
The big one is that she was a lawyer. Trump introduced her as “an attorney.” She went to Pepperdine law school but failed the California bar, and NBC News found no evidence she’s licensed to practice law in any state. She has said she practiced law in China, where she worked at a big Chinese law firm from 2011 to 2013. That was a private firm, not the Chinese government. Legal experts told NBC that only Chinese citizens can take China’s bar exam, though she could have done cross-border consulting.
The watchdog group Campaign for Accountability has asked California’s State Bar to investigate whether she broke the law by calling herself a lawyer without a license. We haven’t seen other false claims documented beyond the law license. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any. It means nobody checked before she got the job.
Was Katie Zacharia a DEI hire?
No. Nothing in the reporting suggests her race, gender or background had anything to do with it. She was hired because Trump liked how she defended him on TV, with almost no checking. That’s a loyalty hire. Trump and his allies have made attacking “DEI hires” a theme, describing them as unqualified people picked for the wrong reasons. By its own standard, this is what an unqualified hire picked for the wrong reasons looks like.
Will Katie Zacharia go to Fox News?
There’s no reporting of that. Her Fox appearances actually helped sink her. Politico reported that Wiles helped set up her Thursday night interview with Sean Hannity, which turned into a grilling over her credentials. One source called it a “sanctioned hit,” which a senior official denied. For now, the White House says she’ll stay on in another job, and Trump said she might keep working for him “in some form, but maybe a more pleasant form.” No successor has been named, and two sources told NBC a new press secretary probably isn’t coming soon.
The BeezLoop Take
The press didn’t do this to Zacharia. She called herself a lawyer, the president repeated it, and nobody in the White House checked. Being a fan of the boss isn’t a qualification for speaking for the U.S. government to the world, and the people who hired her knew that.
Now the plan is to give her a different job. That’s the part to watch. If someone wasn’t vetted for the most public job in the building, putting her somewhere less visible without fixing the vetting doesn’t solve anything.
The open question: what is Zacharia’s new role, and will anyone check her résumé before she starts?
Also on BeezLoop: how Zacharia was fired after five days, and the White House pushing out Kimberly Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece.
Sources: NBC News · Outside the Beltway, summarizing CNN and Politico · LiveNOW from FOX (video)
