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Don opened today’s Live with a simple question: Is she a lawyer? My answer was no. Katie Zacharia cannot legally practice law in any state. The California bar has no record of her passing, and the Wall Street Journal reports she took the exam in 2011 and failed. When reporters asked where she passed the bar, she said: “When I moved to China.” Don pointed out that in China, only Chinese citizens can get a license to practice law.
Don made the point that this scoop came from the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, which is no liberal rag. I pointed out the irony. Murdoch also owns Fox News, and Fox was happy to put “lawyer” on her chyron when she appeared. I argued the scrutiny only came because she went up to that podium so nervous she could barely finish a sentence. That’s when people started digging into her background. Don read Steven Cheung’s statement calling her “uniquely qualified and whip smart” and noted it never says she has a law license.
Then we got to the legal question. Under Section 6126 of California’s Business and Professions Code, advertising yourself as entitled to practice law without an active license is a misdemeanor. Don asked the obvious follow-up: if she did legal work without being a lawyer, did she break the law? I said she might have. Going on Fox News as a lawyer could itself be a problem under California law. Then Don slipped into a “just asking questions” Tucker Carlson impression so good that I told him SNL needs to call.
The part that riled me up most was the double standard. Don reminded everyone that this administration demonized Black women and Latinas as unqualified and claimed DEI was taking jobs from qualified white people. We watched Hegseth fire Black commanders who gave decades to this country, explicitly in the name of getting rid of DEI. They told us they’d replace them with competent people. Instead, we got someone at the podium who sounds like a middle schooler stumbling through a passage of The Odyssey.
Don said Karine Jean-Pierre, whom they called a DEI hire, runs circles around Zacharia on her worst day. Right-wingers came after Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson too, one of the most qualified people on earth for that job.
Don put it plainly. There are no first-day jitters for a White House press secretary and no learning on the job. For certain people, he said, that gets forgiven. For others, you’re a DEI hire. When you’re Black in these rooms, you have to be the most prepared person at the table. I go into a TV hit more prepared than she was at that podium, and she’s supposed to speak for the American people on taxpayer dollars.
This is the Trump administration in a nutshell: incompetent, stumbling over its own feet, and rubbing its failures in our faces three weeks from the midterms. Don’s read on why she got the job is that she looks the part to Trump. That’s the hiring standard. That, and of course, loyalty above all else.
You can watch our full conversation above. This one had a lot of laughs. You won’t regret tuning in. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.
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