Tuesday brought us the latest addition to the Trump administration, the new Press Secretary, Katie Zacharia. It did not go well:
😬 Katie Zacharia's first press briefing was brutally bad 😬Trump managed to find a press secretary who can barely read, but she does have the number one qualification — looking like IvankaHere's a supercut from Zacharia's first briefing, which made Karoline Leavitt seem like Ronald Reagan
Yikes. How are you not prepared to answer questions about Ukraine? Oh wait: I know. It’s because she is a ridiculous person:
Zacharia repeatedly used Truth Social to promote Pizzagate and other fringe conspiracy theories. Pizzagate, which originated in the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign, is the unfounded conspiracy that prominent Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and her 2016 presidential campaign chairman, John Podesta, were involved in a child sex trafficking ring.
Pizzagate’s name comes from the baseless claim that Podesta and others held child sex slaves in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington, D.C., where they also performed satanic rituals. (The establishment does not have a basement.) Online commentators claimed they had uncovered Pizzagate by decoding hacked messages from Podesta’s email account. In December 2016, a man traveled from North Carolina to Comet Ping Pong and opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle. Pizzagate formed the basis for the QAnon conspiracy, a more elaborate theory that contends Satan-worshiping Democrats and Hollywood elites ritually murder and cannibalize children.
Of course she has no love for our democracy:
So she says she’s a lawyer but there’s no evidence of it:
Yet, there is no evidence that Zacharia ever passed a bar exam or has been admitted to practice law in any state. She is not listed as a member of the State Bar of California, the state where she lives. According to her LinkedIn account, she worked as “General Counsel” for a nonprofit in the state called Fix California. Zacharia is also not listed as a member of the State Bar of Texas or as a member of the D.C. Bar, two other places where she worked.
Popular Information searched for evidence in all 50 states, plus D.C., that Zacharia was admitted to practice law anywhere — and found none.
On Sunday, Popular Information emailed White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly with detailed questions about Zacharia’s professional history, including whether she was ever admitted to practice law in any state. Popular Information received the following response from a general White House Press Office email account: “Refer you to the President’s TRUTH on Katie.” That is the social media post that calls Zacharia an attorney.
Then on Tuesday she told us she’d been admitted to the bar in…China:
Q: You said Zacharia is an attorney. Where did she pass the bar exam? What state?ZACHARIA: When I moved to China
OH COME ON.
Ahem:
The official said she had moved to China with her husband after law school because of his job at an American private equity firm, and had worked on international transaction law there before the couple returned to the United States.
Zacharia told NewsNation she had practised with “all the appropriate credentials”, without specifying a jurisdiction.
Her reference to China leaves unclear whether she was describing when she passed an examination or where she qualified.
Eligibility rules for China’s national judicial examination in 2011, when Zacharia reportedly began working in Beijing, required candidates to hold Chinese nationality.
Foreign nationals were therefore ineligible to take the examination, a step towards qualification to practise mainland Chinese law.
Employment at a Chinese law firm does not, by itself, establish that someone holds a licence to practise Chinese law. SCMP has asked Zhong Lun to clarify Zacharia’s role and qualifications. The firm did not immediately respond.
As the video of her debacle spread, so did the stories about her background:
The Trump administration has taken on its first open abortion “abolitionist.” Buckle up.
Up until this year, new White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia sat on the advisory board of an organization that calls for women who have abortions to be executed “in the public square,” and for pro-choice Americans to lose their right to hold public office.
The White Rose Resistance (WRR), where Zacharia sat on the board until February, is best known for its anti-abortion disinformation, harassment campaigns against providers, and for collecting the country’s worst extremists. The group’s national outreach director AJ Hurley, for example, was charged with felony stalking of an abortion provider in San Francisco in 2022. Per his own bio, Hurley is also connected to the woman who was found with multiple fetuses in her home. Good times.
Oh and the woman who was found with the multiple fetuses in her home? This is the case my worthless House rep has championed. All of these extremists are connected.
We are paying her a good deal of money and she responded by blatantly lying and refusing to take the job seriously. There is no excuse for her inability to read words off a piece of paper. She has no real world qualifications and her appointment is a slap in the face of the American people.
Then late Tuesday night the right wing rag The Daily Mail had some news about how Zacharia got hired:
However, it’s been alleged by four sources that the 80-year-old president failed to inform his staff of the appointment before making the announcement, with his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, reportedly being left blindsided by the news.
Moreover, Wiles had been on her own search for the new Press Secretary, with CNN’s Scott Jennings said to have been at the top of her list.
According to the Daily Mail, Zacharia’s appointment might have also left one White House staffer on the chopping block, leading to fears of a mid-term purge in the administration.
It was also allegedly believed that Trump would wait until after the midterms to reveal his new Press Secretary, yet after seeing Zacharia’s performances on Fox News, he reportedly just couldn’t wait.
The sources also noted that the president had decided on Zacharia by Tuesday last week, only giving staff members three days until the decision was confirmed and the story leaked to the media.
And it was supposedly Karoline Leavitt who provided the late warning to Susie Wiles that Zacharia would be taking the coveted role, a source claimed. Leavitt reportedly issued the warning after Trump asked her for her thoughts on whether Zacharia would be a good fit for the role.
OK so that makes perfect sense: she’s Trump’s type so she gets the job. It’s classic GOP DEI.
I don’t know if Temu Ivanka is delusional or just a liar, but at this point in this administration I don’t care. She needs to go ASAP. The only thing I care about is this: how many Scaramuccis will she last?
I’ll leave you with this: