Katie Zacharia is being removed as White House press secretary after just five days in the post, according to two US officials, following a heavily criticised briefing and questions over her professional credentials.
The abrupt departure came a week after President Donald Trump announced her as the replacement for Karoline Leavitt, who stepped aside in August. The White House has not said who will take over the role.
Zacharia was expected to move into another position in the administration, according to people familiar with discussions about her future. Some White House staff reportedly learned of the decision through news coverage.
Her short tenure was marked by scrutiny of claims that she had presented herself as a lawyer despite never passing the California bar examination.
Zacharia graduated from Pepperdine Law School but failed the bar exam in 2011, a fact she acknowledged on Thursday. She said the president of Pepperdine University had advised her that she could describe herself as a “lawyer”, but not an “attorney”.
Speaking to conservative commentator Jack Posobiec, Zacharia said she had never described herself as an “attorney at law” and that there was “a lot of misinformation around the fact that I labeled myself a lawyer”.
“I was very careful how I executed this. I never came across as someone who was an attorney at law,” she said.
Her only White House briefing, on Tuesday, lasted about 15 minutes. Zacharia delivered prepared remarks for roughly 10 minutes before taking questions from three outlets: Breitbart, Fox News and the Daily Mail.
She defended the performance in an interview with Fox News, saying she had received briefing materials on the morning of the briefing and had little time to prepare. The interviewer, Sean Hannity, noted that her appearance had been “widely panned”.
One White House aide said Zacharia had been unusually isolated during the week and had not functioned as a press secretary. “No one thought she was sticking around long enough to even involve her in actual decision-making,” the aide said.
Trump appeared to signal that her tenure was ending as he left the White House on Friday. Referring to criticism from the press, he said: “They’ve been so nasty to her.”
“I said, to her, ‘Honestly if I were you, I’d reconsider. You think about it. But I would reconsider. You got a beautiful husband and family,’” he said, adding that he had met her family the previous day.
Zacharia was seen at the White House on Friday morning and had been invited, along with her family, to dinner with Vice President JD Vance that evening.
In a statement posted on social media after news of her removal emerged, Zacharia praised Trump and said it had been “an honor to work for him”.
Her departure is reminiscent of Anthony Scaramucci’s 11-day tenure as White House communications director during Trump’s first term. Scaramucci said: “Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.”
