WTF Was Trump’s New Press Secretary Doing in China?

It’s not clear if new White House press secretary Katie Zacharia ever actually worked as an attorney—but it is becoming increasingly clear that she was connected to the Chinese government in the past.

Speaking alongside Donald Trump Tuesday, Zacharia informed reporters inquiring about her self-purported legal qualifications that she passed the bar exam when she “moved to China.”

Popular Info’s Judd Legum found that, after analyzing state bar association databases from all 50 states and Washington, Zacharia never actually passed the qualifying legal exam anywhere in the country. But she couldn’t have passed the Chinese equivalent of the bar exam, either, as it’s actually forbidden for foreigners to do so.

Zacharia’s LinkedIn work history places her at Zhong Lun, an elite Chinese multinational law firm, between 2011 and 2013. She worked at the Beijing-based firm as an associate on the international practice team, months after she obtained her J.D. from Pepperdine Caruso Law. Zacharia’s LinkedIn also notes that she spoke Chinese at an “elementary proficiency.”

Like many major Chinese businesses, Zhong Lung operates in an environment in which it can be influenced by the regional government. Since it was founded in 1993, the firm has provided legal services to numerous Chinese government agencies and state-owned enterprises. Some of those entities include China’s Ministry of Justice, People’s Bank of China, the Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Natural Resources, Ministry of Ecology and Environment, and other regulatory bodies, according to the firm’s webpage.

Within that same time period, Zacharia also worked as the manager of fundraising and communications at Compassion for Migrant Children, a Beijing-based nonprofit that provided education and material support to rural migrant workers. The group also noted in an archived profile that it “engage[d] the Chinese government and local educational officials for greater and longer lasting impact.”

Six GOP senators joined together with their Democratic opponents on Tuesday to rebuke President Trump’s recently announced diesel deal with Russia.

Senators Mitch McConnell, Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, Alan Armstrong, Lisa Murkowski, ​and John Cornyn signed a letter along with six Democratic senators in opposition to the deal, which waives sanctions on Russian diesel sold to the global market until April 2027 in exchange for 300,000 tons of diesel fuel to the American and global marketplace. Russia will get an opportunity to financially benefit from international oil sales while Americans get a bit of Russian oil before midterms.

“Granting Moscow the ability to sell Russian diesel freely in global markets damages American security interests and is a betrayal of the people of Ukraine, who continue to defend themselves from [Russian President ⁠Vladimir] Putin’s murderous, illegal war,” the letter read, according to Reuters. “This deal ​is a gift to our adversary and a betrayal of our Allies; it should be rescinded.”

The letter urged Trump to follow the Russia sanctions bill he signed into law last month, in honor of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, which punishes countries that import Russian oil.

Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal, Jeanne Shaheen, Richard Durbin, Sheldon Whitehouse, Jack Reed, and Chris Coons signed the letter.

President Trump is trying to get out of testifying in a lawsuit that he initiated. 

As part of his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC, Trump was scheduled to sit for a deposition with the U.K. broadcaster’s lawyers on Friday. However, according to a court filing Tuesday, the president’s attorneys canceled the session, saying he would be unavailable for about two months, well after the discovery period in the case ends, Politico reports. 

“The President is no longer available for his deposition on October 16 due to other matters of national importance,” Trump’s lawyers told their BBC counterparts. The broadcaster is trying to get a federal judge to force Trump to commit to a date for the deposition.

“Nearly eight months into discovery, after seven depositions of BBC witnesses, and with only two months of discovery remaining, the BBC still has not been able to depose, and does not even have a schedule to depose, the most central figure in this case: Plaintiff himself,” BBC attorney Charles Tobin wrote in the filing. “There is hardly a more crucial and relevant piece of discovery in a defamation lawsuit than the deposition of the Plaintiff.”

Trump’s lawyers had reportedly agreed in July that Trump would testify on October 16 as long as both sides agreed to keep the location and other details secret. But on September 28, the president’s attorneys said that the previously agreed date no longer worked. This past Friday, they finally suggested moving the deposition to the second or third week of January, nearly one month after the discovery period ends. 

Now the BBC’s lawyers want the judge on the case, U.S. Magistrate Judge Enjoliqué Lett, to add the deposition’s scheduling to the agenda of a hearing scheduled for next week.  

Trump sued the BBC last year, claiming the broadcasting company funded by the British government defamed him by deceptively editing one of his speeches on January 6, 2021, for a documentary aired one day before the 2024 presidential election. 

Since then, the lawsuit has backfired for him, as the court ordered the release of Trump’s finances, as well as records from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. Even Trump’s children are dodging subpoenas from the BBC’s lawyers for records related to the January 6 Capitol insurrection.   

The BBC is trying to get Trump’s case thrown out entirely, pointing out that the documentary never aired in the U.S. and that the south Florida federal court where Trump filed the lawsuit doesn’t have jurisdiction over the case. Trump’s refusal to testify on camera is probably going to help the BBC’s efforts and expose his attempts to browbeat news organizations he doesn’t like. 

Did President Donald Trump invent a fictional sailor in order to justify wasting billions of dollars to put old-fashioned technology on naval aircraft carriers?

Speaking at a campaign rally in January 2024, Trump told a story about a sailor aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier who argued on behalf of steam catapults over their more modern electromagnetic counterparts. Trump had been telling the same story since at least 2019—but this time he gave his source a name: Bill Jones.

Trump claimed that “Bill Jones” had lamented the shift to electromagnetic catapults: “They’re no good, sir. They don’t work. And if they break, we have to send to MIT to get a genius to come in and fix them. Whereas the steam, I could fix it with a hammer and a blowtorch.”

The Wall Street Journal attempted to track down the mysterious sailor who informed Trump’s directive to install old-fashioned steam catapults on aircraft carriers. The Journal contacted former Navy officials, White House aides, lawmakers, and industry executives—but no one knew anything about the sailor at the center of Trump’s story. A Navy spokesperson told the publication that without more information, they “cannot accurately locate this Sailor in our records.”

In August, Trump turned this complaint of dubious origin into real policy. The president signed a memo directing the U.S. Navy to redesign the Doris Miller, the newest Gerald R. Ford–class aircraft carrier, and all remaining ships, to install steam catapults.

In a statement at the time, the White House claimed that steam catapults were more “resilient and robust” and that the move would reactivate parts of the maritime industrial base that are “easier to scale.” In reality, steam catapults have been out of production for decades.

Before Trump’s directive, the Navy’s official position was that the electromagnetic launchers have allowed their Ford-class carriers to launch and recover aircraft at a higher rate than previous classes of ships. Additionally, the maintenance on steam catapults is considered labor intensive and costly compared to newer models. In a late August memo, now-acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao wrote that it was not the military’s place to question Trump—but what about Bill Jones, the supposed source behind the president’s plan? By all accounts, Bill Jones doesn’t even exist.

Last year, Russian American investor Konstantin A. Sokolov donated an undisclosed sum to President Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom project. He also gave $12 million to the MAGA Inc. super PAC and hundreds of thousands to the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the Senate campaigns of Susan Collins and Pete Ricketts. Since all those donations, he’s only been rewarded.

Reporting from Talking Points Memo finds that a company that Sokolov manages, called Dynamic Frontier Holdings LLC, was rapidly awarded a license that allowed it to purchase a copper mine in Armenia owned by VTB Bank, which is sanctioned by the federal government due to its role in supporting the Russian financial system. Sokolov’s company was able to bypass the sanctions in October last year and receive a license from the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Controls in just 10 days, a remarkably quick turnaround.

Then, in July, Sokolov was also handpicked by the State Department to lead a $201 million Trans-Caspian enterprise fund looking to invest public funds into the south Caucus.

“He hardly would be my first choice,” former State Department sanctions coordinator Daniel Fried told TPM, highlighting how his business interests in the region could interfere with the fund. “You have to ask yourself whether his involvement in [the Trans-Caspian Enterprise Fund] is going to lead to conflicts of interests.”

Sokolov, who is originally from St. Petersburg, has also met with 1789 Capital, the investment firm where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner.

This report comes just days after another major corruption scandal, where U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle attempted to convince a Republican donor to pay off her American Express card in exchange for access to the Trump administration. On Tuesday, she resigned at the president’s request—but that’s clearly not the end of pay-to-play schemes in this administration.