President Donald Trump repeatedly mocked Kamala Harris during the 2024 presidential campaign for failing the California bar exam on her first attempt, suggesting that her failure reflected a lack of intelligence and that she might also fail a cognitive test.
Trump’s new White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia has now acknowledged that she, too, failed the California bar exam. Unlike Harris, who passed on her second attempt and eventually became California’s attorney general, Zacharia said she never tried again.
On Thursday, Fox News host Sean Hannity asked Zacharia whether it was true that she had not passed the exam.
“Correct,” Zacharia replied.
Asked if she had taken the test a second or third time, she answered: “No, I did not.”
Katie Zacharia says she never retook the bar exam, but maintains she had a legitimate basis for calling herself a lawyer during television appearances.
The Pepperdine Law graduate tells @seanhannity she consulted attorneys before using the title, citing her law degree and previous legal experience.
Zacharia says she wasn’t practicing law or getting paid to provide legal advice, insisting her television appearances focused on general analysis of legal matters.
— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 16, 2026
The admission came days after Trump introduced Zacharia, his newly appointed press secretary, as “an attorney” in a social media announcement.
Zacharia has also described herself as a lawyer, including on her Instagram profile. She graduated from Pepperdine University’s law school in 2011 and subsequently worked with a law firm in Beijing, where she says she practiced international transaction law.
Zacharia told Hannity that she had already planned to move to China with her husband and considered the California exam results “inconsequential.”
“I knew I would be living in China and the results of the bar were inconsequential,” she said, explaining that she sat for the exam rather than withdrawing her application.
[NOTE: Law school graduation and a JD (Juris Doctor) diploma do not represent a license to practice law in the U.S.. A practicing attorney must pass a bar exam and be admitted to a state bar.]
Trump took a considerably harsher view of Harris’s initial failure.
During his July 2024 appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists, Trump was asked whether he would take a cognitive test.
“She failed her law exam. She didn’t pass her law exam, so maybe she wouldn’t pass the cognitive test,” he replied, according to the event transcript.
Trump continued: “She didn’t pass her bar exam, and she didn’t think she would pass it. And she didn’t think she was going to ever pass it.”
[NOTE: Harris passed the California bar in 1990 and served as San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general and a U.S. senator before becoming vice president.]
Trump returned to the subject at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania shortly before the 2024 election.
“She’s not an intelligent person,” Trump told supporters. “She was not a good student, she was a horrible student. She didn’t pass her bar exam.”
The former president also questioned Harris’s intelligence during an interview with Tucker Carlson, calling her a “very low-IQ individual” while again referring to her initial bar exam failure, as documented by The Washington Post.