US President Donald Trump’s administration dismissed White House press secretary Katie Zakaria just five days after appointing her.
On Thursday, Zakaria faced a tough grilling from host Sean Hannity on his Fox News primetime show. After she described herself as a lawyer, questions were raised about her legal qualifications, and Hannity questioned her on the point. Zakaria struggled to answer and failed to defend herself.
Hannity asked her: “You took the bar exam, but you didn’t pass it. Is that right?” Zakaria replied: “Yes, Sean, that’s right.”
According to a report in The Telegraph, the interview was arranged by Susie Wiles, one of Trump’s closest aides, and amounted to a planned attack, because Zakaria had not been her preferred candidate to replace Karoline Leavitt. Trump fired Zakaria a few hours after the interview.
Citing a source, The Telegraph said Wiles and Hannity are close. The source added: “White House spokesman Daniel Alvarez and Susie pushed her in front of Hannity.”
A senior White House official said: “Susie and Sean do talk, but Susie had no need to push anyone, Zakaria included, in front of Sean or anyone else. That is not how she works.”
The official added: “And the Hannity interview was not the only reason Zakaria left. It was mainly her strange interviews and her incoherent answers about being a lawyer that brought her down.”
A spokesperson for Fox News Media said in a statement that who is interviewed and what questions are asked is entirely Sean Hannity’s own decision.
Zakaria told Hannity she graduated from Pepperdine University School of Law in 2011 and married the same week. She said that because she and her husband planned to move to China soon afterwards, she considered the result of the state bar exam “unimportant”.
She said she sat the exam only because she was already registered and did not want a “withdrawn from the exam” mark on her academic record.
Zakaria said she later worked in the international practice of a Chinese law firm, handling cross-border corporate transactions, a role that did not require membership of any US state bar.
Zakaria has described herself as a “lawyer” rather than an “attorney”. She said that after law school she consulted the president of Pepperdine University and was told she could call herself a lawyer but not an attorney.
When Hannity pointed to several posts that had referred to her as an attorney, Zakaria replied: “I think those were retweets, and I corrected them later.”
After the controversy and the interview, Zakaria, who had served as White House press secretary, confirmed that she was stepping down.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Zakaria has worked since June as a senior communications adviser at Trump Media and Technology Group. Earlier this year she spent two months as deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security. Source: NDTV
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