Trump’s New Press Secretary Tries to Backtrack on the China Thing

Katie Zacharia’s latest approach to handling the scandal around her boosted legal credentials involves pretending the whole thing never happened.

The new White House press secretary told The New York Times Wednesday that she had misinterpreted a reporter’s question earlier this week about where she passed the bar exam. At the time, Zacharia answered: “When I moved to China.” Cue pandemonium.

“I assumed the question was, ‘Where were you after law school?’” Zacharia told the Times in a brief phone call.

“That’s all I could hear over the sound of Marine One,” she continued. “And, wanting to respect protocol, the distance behind the president kept me from moving closer to hear the question.”

The Times did not repeat the original question, or press Zacharia about her credentials.

The 42-year-old obtained her JD from Pepperdine Caruso Law in 2011, according to her LinkedIn profile, but how she built her career after school appears to be legally dubious. For years, Zacharia made a name for herself as a legal expert on conservative airways. Her LinkedIn also lists her as “general counsel” for a California-based organization run by longtime Trump ally Ric Grenell. The caveat: she shouldn’t have been able to do either without passing the bar.

Zacharia told the Times that she had consulted with Pepperdine’s president as to how she should identify herself in the news, and shared that she was warned against using labels such as “attorney” or “esquire,” but that “lawyer” was fine.

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

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Zacharia sat for the California bar exam after she obtained her law degree, but she did not pass.

A watchdog group in the state called for an investigation into Zacharia’s resume on Wednesday, stating that she “repeatedly held herself out to the public as entitled to practice law without a license to do so,” conduct that they noted “California law treats as a crime.”

President Trump is fighting attempts to make him testify and produce documents related to his takeover of the Kennedy Center.

In a court filing Wednesday, Trump asserted executive privilege, claiming that in her lawsuit, Kennedy Center board member and Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty initiated “overbroad discovery requests that expressly implicated the President’s involvement in the Kennedy Center’s management and operations, and called for information, documents, and communications concerning that involvement.”

“Those requests are improper, and this Court should deny Plaintiff’s motion to compel. Plaintiff’s arguments to the contrary fail to convince,” the president’s deputy assistant and deputy counsel, Joshua Hoyt, wrote in the document.

Beatty sued Trump late last year over his attempts to take over the center, add his name, and shut it down for repairs. Since then, the president has pressed on with his handpicked board of trustees, rebranding the center with his name and closing it so it can be renovated to his liking, defying multiple court orders along the way.

Now Trump is refusing to testify or provide documentation about his involvement, asserting executive privilege over a pet project that shouldn’t be anywhere near his top priorities as president. His takeover has not so coincidentally coincided with the center’s financial collapse, with most of its cash reserves gone. Donations and pledges are drying up, and ticket sales have plummeted.

“The burst happened up the pipe,” said Andrew Taylor, director of the arts management program at American University, to The Washington Post last month. “The water stopped flowing into the organization because of the choices the administration was making.”

Trump claims that only his name and takeover can save the center from physical and financial ruin. But it seems that things have only gotten worse since he got involved, much like everything else in the U.S.

President Trump would let his friend who “looks like shit” die at his rally.

“I travel with more doctors than any human being. If people get sick in the audience, they leave ’em alone. You know what they call them? Collateral damage,” Trump said at his Wednesday rally in Arizona, receiving some chuckles from the crowd. “If that person right over there, a friend of mine—he looks like shit, actually. He looks like he’s ready to have a heart attack. If he actually had a heart attack, you know what my doctors would do? … They would leave him alone!”

“I say, ‘Please help him!’ They’d say, ‘No sir, we can’t leave your side.’ But he’s dying of a heart attack! ‘Sir, he’s collateral damage,’” he continued. “Can you believe it? They got like six ambulances, and they won’t use one for anybody else.”

It’s unclear who exactly Trump was saying “looks like shit.” But the crowd full of his most loyal supporters just laughed along with him—as if they weren’t collateral damage to him too.

Some commentators pointed to Trump’s lack of filter as a sign of dementia, and indeed shortly before his remarks, Trump was bragging about acing a dementia test.

CNN medical analyst Jonathan Reiner challenged Trump’s notion that doctors would ignore sick people or refer to them as collateral damage.

“This is completely untrue, and an actual insult to the fabulous doctors, nurses, and PAs of the White House Medical Unit,” he wrote online. “Over the years I’ve been honored to get to know many members of the WHMU and I know that they would never call a spectator ‘collateral damage’. They would save their life.”

President Donald Trump wants to build a case to strip Representative Ilhan Omar of her citizenship and deport her.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the federal government is investigating how Omar got her citizenship after she arrived in the U.S. from Somalia as a child, focusing on how her late father filled out her forms. Her Washington, D.C., home was searched on Monday, just three weeks before the midterm elections in November.

Homeland Security agents took her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers, and passport. Several subpoenas have been issued to her relatives and others close to her. It’s obvious that the Trump administration wants to make an example out of her as part of its effort to begin denaturalizing American citizens.

The investigation ostensibly centers on whether Omar’s father put her age as 17 rather than 18 on her citizenship application to allow her to qualify immediately for citizenship alongside his own application. Omar became a citizen in 2000.

“They cheat on everything,” Trump said to an Ohio audience at a rally Monday about Somali Americans. “We’re not going to stand for it.”

In order to strip an American of their citizenship, the Department of Justice has to sue in federal court and prove that the person materially lied to get their status. For years, conservatives have pushed the unfounded rumor that Omar married her brother to bring him to the U.S. Investigations by media outlets and the government have yielded nothing incriminating about her.

Trump’s effort is a racist attempt to single out a Black, hijab-wearing Muslim of Somali descent to satisfy his and the Republican Party’s bigotry. The case is an uphill battle and will result in a drawn-out court fight, but they want to be as cruel and inflict as much damage on Omar and her reputation as possible.

Elon Musk is wiping his hands of the Trump administration’s latest intel scandal.

The SpaceX founder did not deny that his company’s satellite-supplied internet service was suspended in Ukraine earlier this week as Russian missiles barraged Kyiv. Instead, he blamed the lapse on the U.S. military and Donald Trump.

In a statement on X, Musk wrote that “Starshield systems are owned and controlled” by Washington and “any limits on speed or usage are decided by the US military and ultimately POTUS.”

“Starlink is a commercial service owned and controlled by SpaceX,” Musk continued. “Usage of Starlink is limited to civilian or defensive activities and cannot be used for offensive military action, as doing so would be inappropriate for a commercial company.”

But Ukraine’s actions on Tuesday were not offensive. Russian ballistic missiles slammed two plants supplying heat and electricity to Kyiv and damaged a residential building in the capital. At least nine people died in the attacks, reported Al Jazeera.

Ukrainian officials suggested that the strikes could have been prevented if they received the proper intelligence—but there was only radio silence. Multiple sources familiar with the matter told CBS News that U.S. officials had claimed their defense systems had failed to detect the missiles because of “bad weather,” but Kyiv did not buy the excuse.

Around the same time, SpaceX restricted Starlink access within the region, upending Ukraine’s primary internet connection.

On Friday, Trump brokered an eyebrow-raising deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to buy diesel from Moscow, effectively offering the country an economic lifeline that would allow Russia to continue the war.

Zelenskiy torched the deal, arguing to American officials that the arrangement exhibited “weakness.” Trump, apparently, did not appreciate the language choice.

A multiday harassment campaign ensued, in which the Trump administration called European capitals and Kyiv, threatening to cut off military intelligence sharing and weapons deliveries unless Ukraine stopped attacking Russian oil refineries.

On Wednesday, Zelenskiy told Piers Morgan that he felt “betrayed” by Trump and the U.S.

“This is our country, our body, our home, our children.… That’s why it’s painful when Trump chooses one side,” the Ukrainian president said in a clip of the interview shared on X.

“If you’re in the middle, you have to stay in the middle. Not on the wrong side,” continued Zelenskiy. “This is not the right side of history.”