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No corporate overloads. No billionaire owners. No BS.
Trump’s new press secretary, Katie Zacharia, claims she’s a lawyer. Is she?
There is no evidence Zacharia has ever been licensed to practice law — and the White House did not provide any
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When President Trump plucked Katie Zacharia from obscurity and appointed her as his new press secretary, he called her “an attorney.”
This is also how Zacharia, repeatedly and publicly, describes herself. “I’m a lawyer,” Zacharia said during an appearance on the Greg Kelly Show on October 5, 2026. “[A]s a lawyer, the procedural steps are absolutely critical,” Zacharia opined during the August 31, 2026, edition of Fox & Friends First. “I’m a lawyer, I went to Pepperdine, Pepperdine Law,” Zacharia said on the “In Front of Us” podcast on August 14, 2026. “[A]s a lawyer, there’s a big difference between answering something under oath and answering something to the media,” Zacharia explained on CNN on February 7, 2026. There are many more examples.
Zacharia was also identified on screen as a lawyer during at least 18 appearances on Fox News since March 2025.
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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.
A lawyer, by definition, is “an individual who is authorized to practice law.” Merely holding a J.D. degree, as Zacharia does, does not authorize her to practice law. To become a lawyer, she would need to be admitted to a bar, which in most cases involves passing a bar exam.
This is not an academic distinction. In California, where Zacharia says she was employed as “General Counsel” to a nonprofit, holding yourself out as a lawyer when you are not admitted to the state bar (or otherwise authorized to practice) is a crime. According to the law, any person “holding himself or herself out as practicing or entitled to practice law or otherwise practicing law who is not an active licensee of the State Bar, or otherwise authorized pursuant to statute or court rule to practice law… is guilty of a misdemeanor.”
Yes, the internet is overflowing with content. But there is less and less real investigative journalism.
Popular Information is committed to uncovering new facts, even though this process is time-consuming and expensive. But the deck is stacked against us.
On Sunday, we broke the news that White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia is a Pizzagate conspiracy theorist, posting that elites in the Democratic Party and Hollywood were sexually trafficking children and eating people. That story involved analyzing nearly 2,700 posts on Truth Social. It was immediately aggregated by websites seeking to siphon attention and monetize our work with display ads.
Today, we are back with another revelatory investigation on Zacharia. Whether or not we reap the benefits, we continue to do the work.
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Zacharia’s conflicting accounts of her work as “General Counsel” in California
Zacharia’s current LinkedIn page claims that she worked full-time as “General Counsel” to Fix California, a right-wing nonprofit founded by Trump ally Ric Grenell, from January 2024 to March 2025. A general counsel is an organization’s chief legal officer, who represents the organization as an attorney.
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It is unclear, exactly, what work Zacharia did as General Counsel for Fix California. If she was engaged in the practice of law, which is typical work f