White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia has referred to herself as a lawyer but has not passed the bar exam in the U.S., The Wall Street Journal reported this week. The Journal said, citing a person with direct knowledge of the matter, that Zacharia sat for the California bar exam after graduating from law school at Pepperdine University in 2011 and did not pass. President Trump referred to her as an attorney when he announced her appointment as press secretary.

The person said Zacharia took the exam around the time she was planning a wedding and preparing to move to China with her future husband. She moved to Beijing that summer to work as an associate on the international practice team at Zhong Lun Law Firm, a prominent law firm in China. Lawyers later advised her that she could provide legal analysis based on her law degree and international transaction experience, the person said.

Zacharia’s legal credentials came under scrutiny after she did not appear in searches for licensed attorneys in California, Texas or Washington, D.C., under her married or maiden name. Judd Legum, a progressive political activist and journalist, raised questions about her standing as an attorney in his Popular Information newsletter.

Asked by a reporter Tuesday in which state she passed the bar exam, Zacharia said, “When I moved to China,” without elaborating. In a statement this week, she said, “I practiced international transaction law, with all the appropriate credentials.”

White House spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement: “Katie is a fabulous and wonderful addition to the team,” adding that she is “uniquely qualified and whip smart to help inform the American people about all the great things President Trump and his Administration have been doing, and she will do an incredible job as Press Secretary.” A White House official said Zacharia was not hired by the president to work on legal matters.

A person familiar with Zacharia’s employment at Zhong Lun said she was one of four international associates who drafted multimillion-dollar agreements for cross-border transactions and focused on client communication for American and multinational corporations doing business in China. Individuals in the firm’s international division were not required to be licensed as attorneys in China, the person said, because they were technically international legal consultants. A U.S. bar qualification was not relevant to the firm’s work, the person said, because any legal opinions would be handled by local Chinese partners.

Zacharia’s LinkedIn profile lists her as having worked as general counsel for Fix California, a nonprofit founded by Trump administration official Richard Grenell, from January 2024 to March 2025. A person familiar with her tenure there said she directed and served as the point of contact for the organization’s outside lawyers. In February 2025, she told Buck Sexton on “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show” that she had worked as outside counsel to the International Finance Corporation and the World Bank while based in China.

Practicing attorneys in the U.S. are required to be licensed by the jurisdiction in which they practice, generally by passing the bar exam and undergoing a review of their moral character. People who identify themselves as lawyers or attorneys or claim to be able to provide legal services without being admitted to the bar can face criminal charges in some states, and some law schools explicitly discourage graduates from calling themselves lawyers until they have been admitted to the bar. California is widely considered one of the tougher state bar exams to pass: about 55% of test-takers passed the July 2025 exam, while roughly 31% did in February, according to the state’s bar association. Zacharia passed the Multistate Professional Responsibility Examination, a test of a candidate’s understanding of legal and professional ethics, before she sat for the bar, said the person with direct knowledge of the matter.

Two Pepperdine law professors who knew Zacharia spoke about the questions surrounding her credentials. Robert Pushaw, who taught her and later attended her wedding, described her as “a good law student and a genuinely good person” but said he could not say whether the press secretary technically qualified as an attorney, adding that some well-respected legal scholars are not attorneys. Roger Alford, now at the University of Notre Dame, for whom Zacharia worked as a research assistant during law school, remembered her as “a star at Pepperdine” and said he hoped the public would “get to know her before they prejudge her.” Alford said that “generally speaking it would be unusual to say that you’re a lawyer if you’ve not passed the bar somewhere.”

The Journal noted a precedent for senior officials serving without bar admission. Judge Thomas Griffith, a George W. Bush appointee on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, was confirmed by the Senate 73-24 despite criticism that he had served as general counsel for Brigham Young University without passing the Utah bar exam. Past presidents of the Utah Bar said that someone working as a general counsel did not need to be a member of the bar so long as legal advice was given in conjunction with a barred attorney.

Before joining the White House, Zacharia appeared on Fox News, CNN and Newsmax and regularly called herself a lawyer in public appearances, and some of the outlets in which she appeared did the same. “As a lawyer, the procedural steps are absolutely critical to ensure that they get this right,” she told Fox News in an Aug. 31 appearance about the trial of Charlie Kirk’s accused killer, when a chyron at the bottom of the screen referred to her as a legal and political strategist, and as an attorney. Fox News did not respond to a request for comment; the network’s parent, Fox Corp., and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp share common ownership.