Katie Zacharia Claims She Quit Because Everyone Was Sooooo Mean to Her

Katie Zacharia is blaming the meanies in the media for her spectacular flame-out as White House press secretary.

Appearing on Newsmax’s Finnerty Tuesday, Zacharia tried to spin her own narrative on why she was fired after just one week of serving in the White House.

“Listen, the media does not like outsiders, and Washington, D.C., does not like outsiders. And what I would briefly say is that the media and all of Washington made it very difficult for me to do the job that I set out to do,” Zacharia said.

“They would not let me do my job,” she said, which was to “focus” on President Donald Trump.

It may have become difficult to focus amid the intense blowback Zacharia faced regarding her phony legal credentials, train-wreck first press briefing, and disastrous appearance on Fox News’s Hannity, where she tried to defend calling herself a “lawyer” but not an “attorney.”

Newsmax host Rob Finnerty asked Zacharia what she made of her interview with Sean Hannity, whose softball questions about her fake legal background had proven to be too much for her to handle.

“Katie, I was shocked by the Hannity treatment, if I’m being honest. I don’t think he does that unless he gets the green light from somebody, perhaps at the White House, I don’t know,” Finnerty said. “But what do you make of this narrative that Fox did this on purpose, that Hannity and the Fox & Friends interviews were set up, deliberately, not to go well for you?”

Zacharia said she was “perplexed” by her treatment on Fox News because she believed she had a “very friendly rapport” with Hannity. “I was not prepared for the hostility I received,” she said.

Finnerty pushed Zacharia to speculate that her terrible interview with Hannity was the nail in the coffin for her short tenure as press secretary. She agreed that if not for that interview, she hoped she would still be press secretary today.

President Trump spent a lot of time talking about ass and meat at his midterm rallies in Texas on Tuesday.

“I made the mistake of saying that I started off by studying his ass,” Trump said at a rally in Lubbock, referring to his repeated praise of Republican Senate candidate John Husted. “Then I looked at [Husted’s] feet and they were massive … and then I looked at his hands.... He had fingers like sausages.... He went from being down to being up [in the polls]. Maybe I should do that with Ken Paxton, but I’m not sure your body is going to qualify. I’m gonna do it with Ken!”

At another rally hours earlier in Corpus Christi, Trump mimicked Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, who used to be vegan, trying to eat meat.

“I love the meat, ahhh! I love it, look!” he said, making strange gestures and a slurping sound.

This is all a continuation of Trump’s obsession with publicly discussing posteriors, particularly those of Husted and, more recently, MAGA rapper Nicki Minaj. Trump spent the rest of his time in Texas bragging about how great his war on Iran is going, how he should make Venezuela the fifty-first state, and how Talarico wants to make every child in Texas transgender. Not the most inspiring showing less than a week out from the midterms.

“Trump’s commentary on men’s physiques gets more homoerotic by the day, but his absolute revulsion at Ken Paxton’s appearance remains unwavering,” The Bulwark’s Sarah Matthews wrote online.

Flávio Bolsonaro landed in the U.S. Wednesday after the State Department granted the far-right Brazilian senator and his family visas.

Bolsonaro and his family arrived in Miami, the Associated Press reported.

After losing Brazil’s presidential election to incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil on Sunday, Bolsonaro left Guayaquil in Ecuador for Miami, according to The Guardian. Brazil’s Supreme Court had ordered the police to seize Bolsonaro’s passport Monday, as he was under criminal investigation for his connection to a vast money-laundering scheme. The politician was reportedly convinced that he would be arrested following his loss.

Bolsonaro’s father, former President Jair Bolsonaro, is already serving a 27-year prison sentence in the country after being found guilty of plotting a coup when he lost to Lula in 2022.

Lula’s upset victories both times have been definitive blows to the Trump administration, and to any president who has refused to concede the results of a democratically held election. Donald Trump, who has criticized the former Brazilian president’s incarceration, baselessly claimed that his country’s elections had been “rigged.”

“It looked like another rigged election, frankly,” Trump told reporters Monday. “Elections have to be indisputable, and it looked very bad to me.”

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration’s attempt to prosecute former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson over her testimony to the House January 6 committee has hit a snag. 

A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., declined to indict Hutchinson, The Washington Post reported Tuesday evening, citing two anonymous sources. Neville S. Hedley, who told U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui earlier that day that he was acting senior litigation counsel at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, had warned in court that the jury could not agree on an indictment. Hedley didn’t mention a name, but the Post’s sources said it was Hutchinson.

President Donald Trump and his Republican allies have been seeking charges against Hutchinson for months, accusing her of lying to the investigative committee. In March, Representative Barry Loudermilk referred her to the Department of Justice, and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan signed off on it.  

Hutchinson was one of the star witnesses in the committee’s hearings, claiming that Trump was very agitated on January 6, 2021, and fully aware of the potential for violence. She testified that he wanted to march with his supporters on the Capitol, and was furious when his aides and Secret Service detail said that it wouldn’t be safe. 

Trump even tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential limousine known as The Beast, and when a Secret Service agent took his arm, Trump grabbed the agent’s neck, Hutchinson said. Along with then–White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, she said that Trump wanted his armed supporters to march that day, and overheard a conversation where Trump said that Mike Pence “deserves it,” regarding chants of “hang Mike Pence” heard during the riot. 

For now, though, Hutchinson won’t face criminal charges, although MAGA Republicans may try to indict her again. Trump keeps trying to settle old scores in his second term as president. For instance, his Department of Justice just charged former FBI Director James Comey for a third time. 

A federal judge tore into Department of Justice prosecutors Tuesday for attempting to file a new criminal complaint alleging that two ex-FBI agents had lied to Congress during the investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop.

At a hearing, Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui refused to rubber-stamp a superseding complaint, which would have added an obstruction charge against former intelligence analyst Nikki Floris, who ran the intelligence division at the Washington field office, and Bradley Benavides, a former deputy assistant director for counterintelligence.

Faruqui told the prosecutors that if they wanted to file a superseding complaint, then a judge would first have to find probable cause that a crime had actually been committed. Instead, the government had transmitted the complaint in the middle of the night and expected the judge to sign it.

Faruqui said that he believed the government had broken precedent by seeking a superseding complaint without first receiving a judge’s signature.

“I’m concerned with your view as to what the law is,” he said. “Why today, on this one case, have you changed the entire history of how you charge cases?”

After Floris and Benavides surrendered on arrest warrants last week, Faruqui had ordered a hearing on Tuesday in order to establish probable cause for the initial complaint. Notably, the DOJ did not obtain a grand jury indictment against the ex-officials.

On Monday night, the government submitted an unsworn affidavit it claimed would support an additional obstruction charge. Faruqui refused to sign the complaint without reviewing it or finding probable cause, and proceeded to hold the hearing on just the first complaint.