New White House press secretary Katie Zacharia shared at least 15 social media posts identifying her as an “attorney” over the past two years, despite having failed the California bar exam and acknowledging publicly she had been advised not to use that term.
The posts, published to Zacharia’s X and Truth Social accounts between April 2025 and September 2026, included Fox News headlines and One America News segments identifying her as an attorney, a designation she repeatedly amplified to her followers, reports CNN.
At least one of those posts has since been deleted, but posts reviewed by CNN show that Zacharia had amplified the title across both platforms.
She also repeatedly referred to herself as a lawyer in television and podcast appearances, according to a review of interview transcripts.
The posts raise new questions about how Zacharia publicly presented her legal credentials after graduating from Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law in 2011.
A source familiar with her thinking confirmed a Wall Street Journal report that she had failed the bar exam that year.
Zacharia acknowledged as much to Fox News Thursday night and said she did not take the exam a second time.
In interviews with The New York Times and Real America’s Voice, Zacharia said she had consulted Pepperdine’s president and others about how to describe her qualifications before appearing on television, and was told she could use the term “lawyer,” but not “attorney” or “esquire.”
A source familiar with her thinking said that sharing the posts on social media was not intended to be an endorsement of using the title “attorney.”
“I think they were retweets, and I corrected the record and said that those not endorsing the title, they were retweets of a title that had been given,” Zacharia told Fox News Thursday night.
In her interview on Real America’s Voice, Zacharia pointed to the advice she said she had been given about identifying herself as a “lawyer,” adding that her degree helped support her use of the term.
“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 analyse it, not necessarily give advice,” Zacharia told the outlet.
California requires those who practice law in the state to have passed the bar exam and makes it a misdemeanour to pretend to be a lawyer.
The California bar association told CNN it had no record of her “having been licensed to practice law in California,” though it said it could not comment on whether she took the bar exam, citing confidentiality requirements.
“The truth is, is I was very careful how I executed this, and I never came across as someone who was an attorney at law,” Zacharia told Real America’s Voice.
But despite not having passed the bar in the state where she worked, Zacharia repeatedly promoted coverage that called her an attorney.
On 26 April 2025, Zacharia shared a Fox News headline on X reading, “Only Democrats don’t want proof of citizenship in US elections, attorney says.” The post has since been deleted.
She also shared the same headline six times on Truth Social that day, according to six posts on her account and another again on 14 May.
On 23 August 2025, she shared another Fox News headline describing her as an attorney, this time in a segment criticising California Governor Gavin Newsom.
She also reposted six One America News posts identifying her as “Attorney”: on 14 May 2026, two posts on 4 June, another on 17 June, and two posts on 11 September.
