I think most of us know how Katie Zacharia got the position she got as White House press secretary. However, she was asked pretty directly about which state bar exam she passed to become a lawyer, and, well, her answer was not exactly what one would expect. More than that, it appears that Zacharia is not a lawyer at all, at least not according to the available evidence from all 50 states and Washington, DC.
Sir Escanor has the story on Substack:
A résumé that shrinks every time somebody turns on a light.
They asked her a yes or no question.
Which state’s bar did you pass?
Katie Zacharia, standing next to the President of the United States on her first full day at the podium, said she passed it when she “moved to China.”
China is not a state. It’s a country. Specifically, it’s the country this administration has spent years calling the greatest existential threat America faces. I guess things changed when Trump invited Xi Jinping to the White House last week, rolled out the red carpet, and laughed together about Biden’s autopen fiasco…
It’s also a country where foreigners are forbidden from sitting the bar exam at all. So whatever happened in Beijing between 2011 and 2013, it was not a bar exam.
That answer is a loose thread on a very expensive coat.
So lets pull it.
The License That Isn’t There
Judd Legum at Popular Information searched bar records in all fifty states plus the District of Columbia.
Nothing.
Not California, where she lives. Not Texas, where she worked. Not DC, where she worked. 51 jurisdictions. No record that Katie Zacharia has ever been admitted to practice law anywhere in the United States.
She has a Juris Doctor from Pepperdine, class of 2011. That part is real. A JD is a degree, not a license. It means you went to law school and they let you leave. Being a lawyer requires passing a bar and getting admitted by one.
Popular Information emailed the White House with detailed questions. Was she ever admitted to any bar, in any state, ever?
The response, in full:
“Refer you to the President’s TRUTH on Katie.” LMFAO.
That’s the answer. A direct question about a professional license, answered with a link to a social media post where the President says she’s an attorney. Can’t make it up.
When the official position on “does this credential exist” is “the boss says so,” you know you’re in for a real BS story…
Eighteen Times On Screen
Since March 2025, Fox News has put her on air identified as a lawyer at least 18 times.
On October 5, 2026, four days before the appointment, she said it herself on the Greg Kelly Show. Three words. “I’m a lawyer.”
She also carried the title General Counsel at Fix California, a nonprofit run by Ric Grenell.
In California, holding yourself out as entitled to practice law without an active license is a misdemeanor. That’s the statute, not my opinion, and California is where she lives.
I’m not accusing her of a crime. I’m noting that the law exists, the title existed, and the license doesn’t. So you tell me…
The Pill and the Gas Chamber
Now something a little crazy.
June 2025. She’s on a YouTube show called We The People with Gates Garcia, talking about her seat on the board of Seth Gruber’s White Rose Resistance.
Her words, in full, because the context is worse than the clip going around:
She described the board work as an extension of her passion to “get right to the heart of depopulation efforts of abortion, that the racist background of abortion, you know the abortion pill has the same chemicals that they used in the exterminate camps in Nazi Germany.”
And she added that the drug works “to stop the progesterone from flowing and cut off the oxygen to the baby.”
In November 2025 she wrote a version of it down on X: “The abortion pill, Mifepristone, formerly called RU-486, is connected to the manufacturer of the deadly gas Zyklon B, used in the World War II concentration camps.”
Now, the gas used in the chambers was hydrogen cyanide, sold under the trade name Zyklon B. Carbon monoxide at some camps.
Mifepristone is C29H35NO2. A synthetic steroid that blocks progesterone receptors. Misoprostol, the second drug in medication abortion, is a synthetic prostaglandin analog developed by the American company Searle in 1973.
The chemical overlap with hydrogen cyanide is zero. Not disputed. Not contested. Not a question of framing. Zero.
The “cut off the oxygen to the baby” line is wrong on its own terms too. Blocking a hormone receptor is not asphyxiation. Those are different words because they describe different things.
Her written version at least has a traceable logic, so let’s follow it all the way down. Mifepristone’s eventual manufacturer traces back through corporate lineage toward I.G. Farben, which had an ownership connection to Degesch, which produced Zyklon B.
That genealogy is real but It’s also not an argument.
What a company’s parent did in 1942 tells you nothing about the molecular structure of a drug developed in another country four decades later.
Mifepristone was developed in France around 1980 by a biochemist named Étienne-Émile Baulieu.
He was born Étienne Blum. Strasbourg, 12 December 1926. Jewish parents. His father, a doctor, died when he was four. His mother raised him.
Strasbourg fell under German occupation. The family fled and ended up near Grenoble.
At fifteen years old, he changed his name to join the French Resistance.
That’s where “Baulieu” comes from. It’s a Resistance alias. He kept it for the next 80+ years. He died in Paris on 30 May 2025, at 98.
The drug the White House press secretary says contains the chemicals of the extermination camps was invented by a Jewish teenager who fought the people operating them.
And this isn’t even the first time somebody tried it. He was accused of being a Nazi during his own lifetime, by activists running a version of the same argument.
I’m not asking whether she knew. I’m asking what it takes to say that sentence in public without ever once stopping to check. Press Secretary material….
That’s her job now. Telling 350 million people what’s true.
The Thing She Used to Scream About
Here’s where it gets interesting, and where I part ways with everyone else writing about her this week.
The mainstream press has spent three days discovering that Katie Zacharia promoted Pizzagate and QAnon on Truth Social. Elite trafficking networks. Hollywood. Democrats. The whole clow show psyop.
They want you to think that makes her crazy.
I don’t care that she said it. I care what she did next.
She built a brand on elite child trafficking. She sat on a board talking about depopulation efforts. She posted about it, repeatedly, publicly, for years.
And then she took a job as the official voice of the administration that handed you Epstein Files Phase One.
Remember that one? The binders. The influencers walking out of the White House holding them up for the cameras like it was Christmas morning. The world’s first pre-release of a human trafficking blackmail operation. A select few clowns getting early access to a partial file that turned to shit.
She screamed about the network for years. Now she speaks for the people who ran the cover-up as a press event. You really, really, -can’t make it up.
That isn’t hypocrisy.
This is the pipeline working exactly as designed. You get recruited on outrage, promoted on loyalty, and installed at the podium, where your entire function is to stand between the public and the thing you once claimed to be fighting.
From Trump cards to Trust Me Bros. Every single time.
This is why shes a perfect pick for Trump.
The Résumé That Shrinks
Watch what happens to one job description over sixteen months.
February 2025, on Buck Sexton’s show: “I was the outside counsel to the IFC and the World Bank.”
Outside counsel. To the International Finance Corporation. And the World Bank.
June 2026, in a corporate press release from a mining company appointing her: matters involving “organizations associated with” those institutions.
Associated with.
Same work. Same person. One version for a friendly podcast, a different one for a document with legal exposure attached.
The truth usually lives in the gap between those two sentences, and that gap closed the second a lawyer had to sign off on it.
Beijing, 2011 to 2013
After law school she moved to China and worked at Zhong Lun, one of the country’s largest firms. Roughly 2,500 professionals.
Working at a Chinese firm without an American license isn’t suspicious by itself. If the work never touches a US court, you don’t need one.
Now go look at what Zhong Lun actually does, according to the Beijing municipal government’s own English-language investment portal.
The listing names 28 practice areas.
Among them: the Belt and Road Initiative and overseas investment.
And: national defense and military industry.
That’s Beijing’s own government website, advertising the firm to foreign money.
Here’s what it does tell you.
The firm where America’s chief spokesperson spent two years is marketed by the Chinese state as doing Belt and Road work and defense industry work.
And the administration she speaks for calls Belt and Road a weapon aimed at the United States. How a couple conflicts of interest complaints haven’t come up is beyond me. And that right there is the entire point, how corruption breeds corruption.
Same City, Same Years, Different Zacharia
Her husband, Tyler Zacharia, was in Beijing at the same time.
Georgetown School of Foreign Service. Pepperdine MBA. Fluent Mandarin. By his own LinkedIn, eight years in Beijing, roughly 2007 to 2013, as a vice president at Schulze Global Investments, later SGI Frontier Capital, later Cerberus Frontier Capital.
Emerging markets private equity. Investments across China, Mongolia and Brazil. Helped launch funds and local teams in Ethiopia and Mongolia.
Then he left finance and went into movies.
He’s now COO of 2521 Entertainment, with credits as producer or executive producer on more than 20 films.
Including Martin Scorsese’s Silence. And The Irishman.
Sit with that arc for a second.
Beijing private equity. Then Hollywood film financing. Then married to the voice of the White House.
Three of the most leverage-dense rooms in American life, one household.
The Man Who Started The Firm
Gabriel Schulze founded Schulze Global Investments in China in 2006. Mining family money. Lives in Singapore.
He did business in North Korea. Forbes covered it in 2011. In 2012 he tried to bring Coca-Cola products into North Korea without authorization from Coca-Cola, which is a sentence I did not write. Forbes did.
In 2017 he approached the Trump administration with a message. A senior North Korean official wanted a backchannel to the White House.
He took it to Jared Kushner. Kushner, who had no security clearance at the time and still doesn’t, handed it to CIA Director Mike Pompeo. Pompeo made a secret trip to North Koreo that April. Trump met Kim Jong Un in Singapore in June.
Oh the timming…
The New York Times reported it on the 17th of June 2018. Schulze’s statement to them: “I do not discuss the nature of my business or personal relationships.”
The Times also noted he’d first met Trump family members years earlier, when they were exploring business deals in Asia.
Where The Firm Ended Up
In 2018, Cerberus Capital Management bought SGI Frontier Capital. Schulze became a Senior Managing Director.
Cerberus was co-founded in 1992 by Stephen Feinberg.
In 2021, Brian Hook joined Cerberus as vice chairman for global investments. Hook had been Trump’s Director of Policy Planning at State and his Special Representative for Iran. He flew to North Korea with Pompeo in May 2018 for the Kim meeting and the hostage release. He worked with Kushner on the Abraham Accords.
So the firm that bought the husband’s old shop absorbed the man who opened the North Korea channel, and then 3 years later, one of the officials who walked through it.
And then Cerberus got something considerably better than a channel….
The Pentagon
March 2025, Stephen Feinberg was sworn in as the 36th Deputy Secretary of Defense.
Second in command at the Pentagon. SECOND!
He listed assets worth at least two billion dollars when nominated. Cerberus manages roughly 65 billion.
He filed paperwork saying he divested. Here’s what divested turned out to mean.
He reserved the right to move his Cerberus holdings into irrevocable trusts benefiting his adult children. Perfectly legal under federal conflict-of-interest law. Ethics experts say it guts the purpose of that law, which is a different thing from breaking it.
Cerberus continues providing him administrative services. At his own request, Defense Department officials approved an extension earlier this year letting that financial relationship continue with no end date.
Now the contracts.
Golden Dome for America. A missile defense program modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome.
185 billion dollars.
Feinberg oversees the office running it. Imagine that.
At least four companies owned or part-owned by Cerberus have been awarded Golden Dome contracts.
The Pentagon refuses to disclose what those contracts are worth. Senator Elizabeth Warren has written repeatedly demanding the numbers and been refused each time. The Defense Department is only legally required to announce contracts above 9 million dollars. Below that line, silence.
General Michael Guetlein runs Golden Dome. Warren quoted his own description of the chain of command: he reports to the deputy secretary, and only to the deputy secretary.
Warren has also flagged that Feinberg hired multiple key Defense Department staff with Cerberus ties.
Cerberus also owned DynCorp, the private military contractor, from 2010 to 2020, which raised conflict questions during Feinberg’s earlier stint on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.
None of that is my allegation. It’s documented by ProPublica, Bloomberg, Inside Defense, and the official letters of a sitting United States senator.
Somebody Knew Early
One more thing, and nobody is covering it.
When her appointment was announced, Kalshi, the prediction market, said it was probing suspicious trades tied to her selection.
Somebody appears to have been betting on Katie Zacharia before the rest of the country had heard her name.
I don’t know who. I don’t know what came of it. The Times of Israel reported it and I haven’t seen a follow-up anywhere.
That’s just a question nobody at the podium is going to be asked.
Fifteen Minutes
Her first briefing ran under 15 minutes.
She spent more than half of it reading prepared remarks. Then she took three questions. All three from conservative outlets. Breitbart, Fox News, and the Daily Mail.
Fox asked whether the United States had stopped sharing intelligence with Ukraine.
She said she’d have to get back to them.
What This Actually Is
Line up only the documented. Let’s see how it al llooks.
She has no findable law license and told the country she passed the bar somewhere she legally couldn’t have. She said an abortion drug contains Nazi gas chamber chemicals, when it contains a synthetic steroid invented by a Jewish Resistance fighter. She said she was outside counsel to the World Bank until a lawyer made her put it in writing, and then she wasn’t.
Three claims. Three collapses on contact with a search engine. Before lunch on day one.
She spent years posting about elite child trafficking networks, then became the official voice of the administration that turned the Epstein files into a photo op and delivered nothing.
She spent two years at a Chinese firm the Beijing government advertises as doing Belt and Road and defense industry work.
Her husband spent eight years in Beijing private equity, then moved into Hollywood film financing. His firm’s founder ran deals in North Korea and carried its message to Jared Kushner. That firm got bought by Cerberus. Cerberus hired the Iran envoy who flew to Pyongyang. And Cerberus’s co-founder now runs the Pentagon’s second-highest office, where at least four of his old firm’s companies are collecting contracts from a 185 billion dollar program he personally oversees, for sums the Pentagon won’t disclose.
And an Israeli newspaper welcomed her appointment with a headline calling her a MAGA loyalist who defended Netanyahu, citing her defense of him over the ICC arrest warrant. They described her as having no extensive record on Middle Eastern affairs, and positions generally favorable to Israel’s current leadership. Their words, not mine.
None of it is a crime but all of it is the costume.
This is an administration that ran on China as the enemy since 2016, decoupling as the mission, and America First as the whole identity. Its podium is now staffed by a woman whose legal career happened in Beijing, married to a man whose finance career happened in Beijing, inside a network that keeps resolving back to one private equity firm, which happens to be running the Pentagon and the Golden Dome.
They’re tough on China at the podium, but China is on the résumé. Quite literally.
The swamp didn’t get drained. The swamp got updated. It became a protected wetland for Epstein-class predators.
three Questions For The Podium
Which state’s bar, and what year?
Which Zhong Lun clients did you work for?
What did your husband’s fund buy in China?
She takes about three questions.
That should be exactly enough.
Truth. Fire. Purpose.
The End.
🔗 Substack, consider upgrading.
☕ Fuel the fire
If not, no worries. But the least you can do is like, comment and share!
The truth doesn’t need everyone, just enough of us.
Be cool, fookers!
RECEIPTS
The bar license investigation. No record in 50 states plus DC. The “Refer you to the President’s TRUTH on Katie” response. Eighteen Fox appearances. The Greg Kelly Show quote. Fix California General Counsel title. California misdemeanor statute. The IFC and World Bank discrepancy.
Judd Legum, Popular Information, October 2026
Secondary coverage:
https://www.rawstory.com/amp/katie-zacharia-attorney-2678078040
https://www.joemygod.com/2026/10/report-zacharia-may-be-lying-about-being-a-lawyer/
The “moved to China” bar claim, and the fact that foreigners cannot sit the Chinese bar exam
The New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/post/216545/donald-trump-new-press-secretary-lie-lawyer
Appointment, Pepperdine degrees, China years, Trump Media role, prior DHS spokesperson role
ABC News
https://abcnews.com/Politics/katie-zacharia-offered-white-house-press-secretary-job/story?id=137140926
The June 2025 abortion pill quote in full context, We The People with Gates Garcia, White Rose Resistance board
https://www.aol.com/articles/donald-trumps-white-house-press-220709000.html
The November 2025 X post, the I.G. Farben and Degesch reasoning, and why it fails
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/trump-press-secretary-zacharia-mifepristone-zyklon-b-claim-1824894
https://www.ibtimes.sg/katie-zacharias-abortion-pill-claim-why-trumps-new-press-secretary-linked-mifepristone-nazi-94924
Chemistry: Zyklon B as hydrogen cyanide, mifepristone as synthetic steroid, misoprostol developed by Searle 1973
Étienne-Émile Baulieu. Born Étienne Blum, Strasbourg, 12 December 1926, Jewish parents. Family fled to Grenoble. Changed his name at fifteen to join the French Resistance. Developed RU-486. Died Paris, 30 May 2025, aged 98.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne-%C3%89mile_Baulieu
https://laskerfoundation.org/in-memoriam-etienne-emile-baulieu/
https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/dr-etienne-emile-baulieu-dead-abortion-pill-mifepristone-france-125053100464_1.html
Baulieu accused of being a Nazi during his own lifetime
Ms. Magazine obituary
https://msmagazine.com/2025/06/04/etienne-emile-baulieu-abortion-pill-inventor-women-health-death-mifepristone-ru-486/
Pizzagate and QAnon promotion on Truth Social
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/10/trumps-new-press-secretary-spread-anti-lgbtq-theories-about-revolting-rabid-leftists/
https://www.joemygod.com/2026/10/new-wh-press-sec-has-history-of-extremist-tweets/
Zhong Lun practice areas, including Belt and Road Initiative and national defense and military industry
Beijing Municipal Government, official English-language investment portal
https://english.beijing.gov.cn/investinginbeijing/business_service/legal/bs_law_firm/202305/t20230531_3118179.html
Tyler Zacharia. Eight years in Beijing. SGI Frontier Capital. Cerberus acquisition. 2521 Entertainment. Scorsese credits. Quoting his own LinkedIn.
https://www.mensjournal.com/news/katie-zacharia-husband-tyler-family-kids-children-married
Gabriel Schulze. SGI founded in China 2006. North Korea business. The unauthorized Coca-Cola attempt.
Forbes, “Invading North Korea,” October 2011
https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/1024/feature-invade-north-korea-cola-gabriel-schulze-gady-epstein.html
The Kushner backchannel, the Pompeo handoff, and the “about a dozen” brokers caveat
New York Times, 17 June 2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/us/politics/north-korea-back-channel-kushner-gabriel-schulze.html
The Hill
https://thehill.com/policy/international/asia-pacific/392656-north-korea-looked-to-set-up-communications-backchannel/
Cerberus acquires SGI Frontier Capital, 2018
Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/article/business/buyout-firm-cerberus-to-buy-sgi-for-foothold-in-frontier-markets-idUSKCN1N63JX/
Brian Hook joins Cerberus as vice chairman, 2021. Prior roles at State, the Pyongyang trip with Pompeo, Abraham Accords work with Kushner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Hook
Stephen Feinberg sworn in as 36th Deputy Secretary of Defense, 17 March 2025
https://history.defense.gov/DOD-History/Deputy-Secretaries-of-Defense/Article-View/Article/4244309/stephen-a-feinberg
Four Cerberus-owned companies awarded Golden Dome contracts. The trust arrangement for adult children. The open-ended extension. The $2 billion in listed assets. The $9 million disclosure threshold.
ProPublica
https://www.propublica.org/article/trump-administration-financial-disclosures-steve-feinberg
Warren’s demands, the Pentagon’s refusal to disclose contract values, Guetlein’s reporting line, Cerberus-linked DoD hires
Office of Senator Elizabeth Warren, official press releases
https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-questions-deputy-secretary-of-defense-on-conflicts-of-interest-involving-dods-golden-dome-missile-defense-program/
https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/warren-presses-deputy-defense-secretary-on-conflicts-of-interest-related-to-companies-bidding-on-major-golden-dome-missile-defense-program/
Cerberus still providing administrative services, divestment questions
Bloomberg, 27 April 2026
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-27/senator-warren-urges-feinberg-to-completely-cut-cerberus-ties
Ynet headline describing her as a MAGA loyalist who defended Netanyahu. The ICC arrest warrant defense. The Mamdani comments. The “political titan” and Napoleon pieces.
https://www.ynetnews.com/article/bj00iogvszg
Kalshi probing suspicious trades tied to her selection
Times of Israel
https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-media-commentator-katie-zacharia-named-as-new-white-house-press-secretary/
First briefing: under fifteen minutes, three questions, all conservative outlets, the Ukraine intelligence non-answer
NBC News
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trumps-new-white-house-press-secretary-katie-zacharia-first-briefing-rcna602948
