The new White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was fired on Friday after less than a week on the job, the New York Times reported, citing “three people familiar with the matter.”
Zacharia gave a halting performance during her introductory press conference on Tuesday and took only three questions from reporters in five minutes before ending the briefing.
Later that day, a reporter asked Zacharia, who graduated from Pepperdine University School of Law and who frequently described herself as a “lawyer” during media appearances before the White House hired her, in what state she passed the bar exam.
“When I moved to China,” she replied.
Zacharia worked for Zhong Lun Law Firm in China, where she says she was part of an international legal practice division
Her non-sequitur about moving to China prompted days of media reporting that revealed that Zacharia had failed the bar exam in California in 2011. She told Sean Hannity on Fox News on Thursday that she has never re-taken a bar exam.
A liberal watchdog group, the Campaign for Accountability, filed a complaint with the California State Bar Association on Wednesday alleging that Zacharia had misrepresented herself as a lawyer, which is a crime in California.
Zacharia told Hannity that she had been advised that having failed the bar exam she could call herself a “lawyer” but not an “attorney.” CNN reported 15 instances on social media where Zacharia had said she was an “attorney,” mostly in posts where she was quoting Fox News articles that describe her as such.
She claimed in a response to a question from Hannity about those posts that she had “corrected the record and said that those were not endorsing the title, they were retweets of the title that had been given.”
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday before the Times reported her firing that if he had known that she was not a lawyer it “probably wouldn’t have mattered” in her appointment.
“I wasn’t hiring her to be a lawyer,” he said. “I was hiring her to be a press secretary.”He also said that he had told her to “reconsider” accepting the job over the media firestorm.
“She has suffered over the last few days,” he said. “I mean, maybe it’s not for her.”
“Katie’s been treated very badly by the media, very, very badly, very unfairly, I think, and I just spoke to her about it,” Trump told reporters, per the pool report. “I said, ‘Katie, is this for you?’ Because you know she’s been treated very rough, and she’s a nice person, very nice person.”
“Just two minutes ago, I said, ‘Katie, you know, you don’t have to do this if you don’t want,’” Trump said, according to the pool report. “She said, ‘This is a lot tougher.’ I said, ‘Welcome to the world of Trump.’ I’m going to let her make that decision.”
Zacharia’s reported ouster is redolent of other short-lived Trump appointments but may be a new record for fewest days on the job.
Trump’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, resigned after 24 days in 2017 over his contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, about which he had lied to the FBI and later pleaded guilty to a felony.
In the White House press office, Trump fired Anthony Scaramucci 11 days after he was hired as communications director in 2017 and after he held a bizarre, profanity-laced phone call with a reporter from the New Yorker about press leaks.
Zacharia started the job on Monday and, per reports, lasted less than five days.
