"I'm a Lawyer." Said the White House Press Secretary. Florida Would Like a Word

T. Chaz Stevens

Oct 15, 2026

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TL;DR: The new White House Press Secretary keeps telling national TV she’s a lawyer, and no bar in America has her on file. In Florida, that’s a felony. Tonight I filed UPL complaints with The Florida Bar and the State Bar of California and sent copies to two DAs. This isn’t my first trip to the Bar’s Tampa UPL office, either. Last year I filed six there, and all six were accepted, investigated, and are now sitting in front of the local UPL committee.

Tonight I filed an unlicensed-practice-of-law complaint with The Florida Bar against the new White House Press Secretary, Kate Sharon Zacharia, who you know as Katie. Then I filed a second one with the State Bar of California and sent copies to the district attorneys in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, because if you’re going to do a thing, you might as well do it right.

Every outlet this week covered the California angle after Campaign for Accountability filed there on Wednesday, and good for them. In California, calling yourself a lawyer without a license is a misdemeanor.

Every filing like this costs money. Records requests carry fees, certified copies carry fees, and archiving a press secretary’s X bio before it quietly changes takes hours I don’t bill anybody for. There’s no foundation behind this work and no board signing off on it. There’s just you.

If you want more of these, chip in directly here. Any amount goes straight to the next filing.

Or go paid at $16 a month or $160 a year, and you’ll get the full complaints and every exhibit instead of the preview. If you’d like to be the reason the next press secretary checks her bio before going on Fox, the founding tier is $1,000.

Zacharia has a law degree from Pepperdine, and nobody’s disputing that. But a law degree says you went to law school, and a law license says you’re allowed to practice, and she appears to have the first one without the second.

The State Bar of California told CNN it has no record of a license under her married name or her maiden name. Popular Information went through all 50 states and D.C. and came up empty. I ran The Florida Bar’s lawyer directory five different ways, ineligible members included, and got nothing under either name... just one sound-alike, plus a Kate Black who went to George Washington Law and is somebody else entirely.

When someone finally asked her where she passed the bar, she said:

“When I moved to China.” (Popular Information)

Florida does keep a door open for lawyers trained abroad. It’s called a Certified Foreign Legal Consultant, and to get through it you need to have practiced foreign law for three of the last five years and keep an office in Florida. Her job at a Beijing law firm ended in June 2013 (CNN), and the Bar’s foreign consultant directory, which lists a little under 200 people, doesn’t have a single Zacharia or Black on it.

In June 2026, Zacharia took a job as a senior communications advisor at Trump Media & Technology Group (CNBC). Trump Media is a Florida corporation, and according to its own SEC filing, its principal executive office sits on North Cattlemen Road in Sarasota.

And while she was cashing a Florida paycheck, she kept telling national audiences, Floridians included, exactly what she was.

On August 14, on a podcast called In Front of Us With Jeff Storobinsky, she said she was a lawyer who went to Pepperdine Law and practiced corporate law in Beijing. Two weeks later, Fox introduced her on Fox & Friends First as “Attorney Katie Zacharia,” and she told viewers that “as a lawyer,” the steps in that case were critical. On October 5, she told The Greg Kelly Show on 77 WABC, “I’m a lawyer.”

Her X bio, archived on October 9 (Internet Archive), put her Trump Media title right next to the word “Lawyer.”

No jurisdiction. No asterisk. No little footnote that says “worked at a Beijing firm for a couple of years during the Obama administration.”

Florida Statute 454.23 says anyone who isn’t authorized to practice law here and holds “himself or herself out to the public as qualified to practice law in this state,” or who “willfully takes or uses any name, title, addition, or description implying that he or she is qualified,” commits a third-degree felony. That’s up to five years, which puts it in the same class as aggravated assault.

California’s version, Business and Professions Code section 6126(a), covers anyone “holding himself or herself out as practicing or entitled to practice law” without a license. Every statement counts as its own offense, and there doesn’t have to be a client.

Her X bio called her “General Counsel to Fix California | Lawyer” as far back as September 2025, and California gives prosecutors one year on a misdemeanor. That clock is running, which is why the DAs got their copies tonight instead of next month.

This isn’t my first rodeo with the Tampa UPL office. Last year I filed six pro se UPL complaints there, and all six were accepted, investigated, and are now sitting in front of the local UPL committee.

I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t give legal advice.

Which, I’d note, is more than the White House Press Secretary can say.

I file the paperwork, I attach the exhibits, and the Bar decides. I trust The Florida Bar to follow the record wherever it leads.

The exhibits went in with the complaints: the 8-K, the archived X bio, the Bar directory searches, and the broadcast transcripts with timestamps. The Florida Bar has them, the State Bar of California has them, and two district attorneys have them.

Every filing like this costs money. Records requests carry fees, certified copies carry fees, and archiving a press secretary’s X bio before it quietly changes takes hours I don’t bill anybody for. There’s no foundation behind this work and no board signing off on it. There’s just you.

If you want more of these, chip in directly here. Any amount goes straight to the next filing.

Or go paid at $16 a month or $160 a year, and you’ll get the full complaints and every exhibit instead of the preview. If you’d like to be the reason the next press secretary checks her bio before going on Fox, the founding tier is $1,000.

The next complaint is already in the drafts folder.

Chaz Stevens is a First Amendment practitioner in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His work forced one governor to rewrite state law — and the governor wrote him into the bill by name. Oh, hell yeah! He drafts civil litigation pleadings and engineers public records work product for licensed attorneys at Sufficient to Show, and is the founder of REVOLT Training.