Last year, a Fox News interviewer touted a MAGA commentator’s legal acumen, claiming that based on her commentary, “Now you know for sure, Katie Zacharia is a licensed attorney.” She literally isn’t — Popular Information’s Judd Legum revealed Tuesday that Zacharia, a graduate of the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law and the newly minted White House press secretary, is not licensed to practice law in the United States, and the Wall Street Journal reported that she took but did not pass the California bar exam.

Zacharia joined Fox & Friends First on November 25, 2025, to discuss the news that a federal judge had tossed the Justice Department’s politically motivated charges against Trump irritants James Comey and Letitia James on the grounds that the prosecutor who brought them, then-U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, had been improperly appointed.

Co-host Todd Piro introduced Zacharia as a “Republican political strategist and lawyer” before asking her, “How can the DOJ fix this?”

Zacharia claimed that the “Clinton judge” had been trying to “protect Comey and James,” later adding that “it is very difficult to watch the weaponized system continue to protect these people.”

Over the course of the interview, she repeatedly cited the section of the U.S. Code she claimed supported her position that Halligan had been properly appointed, and she stated that she believed then-Attorney General Pam Bondi should “appeal both, and then maybe bifurcate them or separate them and go after Letitia James separately.”

Zacharia’s use of citations and vocabulary made an impression on Piro, who closed the interview by praising his guest.

“In case you had any question whether Katie Zacharia was a lawyer when she started citing code sections, she threw in a ‘bifurcate’ in there,” he said. “Now you know for sure, Katie Zacharia is a licensed attorney.”

Zacharia did not respond to Piro’s description, but told The New York Times in an interview this week that she had “consulted with Pepperdine’s president as to how she should identify herself” in TV interviews and “said she was warned not to use the words ‘attorney’ or ‘esquire,’ but that ‘lawyer’ was OK.” On-screen text during the Fox & Friends First interview also identified her as an “attorney.”

As for the quality of Zacharia’s legal analysis, Halligan left the DOJ without being restored to her previous post, and while the Trump administration has continued its pursuit of Comey and James, those indictments have not been revived.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters