In a court, titles often come before the paperwork. A word appears in a caption under a face on a television screen, appears again the next week and the week after, and before long it does the work a licence would do. That is one way to read the case of Katie Zacharia, who for years was introduced to audiences as a lawyer and who now speaks from the White House podium for President Donald Trump.
On Wednesday, 14 October 2026, the Campaign for Accountability, a Washington-based nonprofit led by Michelle Kuppersmith, filed a complaint with the State Bar of California, the agency that licenses the state’s lawyers, as Al Jazeera reported with The Associated Press. The group, which calls itself nonpartisan, asks the bar to investigate whether Zacharia broke California law by repeatedly holding herself out as a lawyer, and to refer the matter to prosecutors if it finds that she did. She had been in the job only since Tuesday. Trump named her press secretary days earlier, as successor to Karoline Leavitt.
The paper trail
The record she built for herself runs like this. According to her LinkedIn profile, she graduated from Pepperdine Caruso School of Law in 2011, then worked as an associate at Zhong Lun, a Beijing law firm, from 2011 to 2013. A biography published by Trumpettes USA Inc says that while in Beijing she “served as outside counsel” for the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation. LinkedIn also lists her as general counsel of Fix California, a voter-rights group founded by a Trump administration official; the complaint puts that job at January 2024 to March 2025 and describes it as full-time. Her Instagram biography reads “Wife, Mom, & Lawyer.”
Then came the television years. She was a frequent commentator on Fox News and Newsmax, and the complaint counts at least 18 Fox News appearances since March 2025 in which the on-screen caption identified her as a lawyer. Between the studios she spent several months as a communications adviser at the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s second term. Since June she has been a senior communications adviser at Trump Media and Technology Group, the company that owns Truth Social. She owns a home in Ventura County, California.
Fifty states and a district
The questions were first raised by Popular Information, a newsletter, which says it asked all 50 states and Washington, DC whether she had ever been licensed and found no record in any of them. The San Francisco Chronicle reached the same conclusion: she held many legal roles but is not licensed to practise law in the United States. Rick Coca, a spokesperson for the California bar, said there was “no record of Kate Sharon Zacharia or Kate Sharon Black,” or of any other version of her married or maiden names, “having been licensed to practice law in California.” The bar says confidentiality rules prevent it from confirming that it has received the complaint or that it is investigating.
“When I moved to China”
Asked by reporters where she had passed the bar, Zacharia answered: “When I moved to China.”
The answer has a problem. China’s equivalent of a bar exam, the National Unified Legal Professional Qualification Examination, is open only to Chinese citizens, according to the AP. China has rarely allowed foreigners to practise law at all, and then only those with several years of experience in their home countries, which does not appear to describe her. In a statement to the AP, Zacharia said: “I practice international transaction law, with all the appropriate credentials.” She did not say where those credentials came from. When NBC News and other outlets covered the complaint, the White House had still not said which bar, if any, she passed. Reportedly, when one reporter asked directly whether she had ever been admitted to a bar, the press office simply pointed to Trump’s social media post announcing her appointment, which called her “an attorney.”
The president’s post, then, served as her credential. In this court an announcement from the throne counts as a document.
What California calls it
California does not treat the matter as a question of style. Under state law, anyone “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.”
Kuppersmith said Zacharia used the title “to buttress her reputation and credibility as a television legal commentator,” and added: “Yet it seems it was all a lie.”
“In California, calling yourself a lawyer without a license isn’t puffery; it’s a crime.”
Some sympathy is owed here, though not to the press secretary. It is owed to the viewers who saw the word under her face and believed it, because that is what captions are for. People who need a lawyer usually have little money and little time, and they rely on the label. Whatever the bar decides, that word was carrying weight on those broadcasts.
The first briefing
Her first briefing lasted less than 15 minutes. She appeared to falter and at times repeated herself. Much of it went to reading a prepared statement and thanking the president. She took questions from only a handful of reporters, some of them from conservative outlets. “I have wanted to work for him for a very long time,” she said.
For now the bar in San Francisco says nothing, as its rules require. The post announcing her appointment still describes her as an attorney.