UPDATE: Literally minutes after I posted this, I saw reports that she is “transitioning” out of the White House Press Secretary role. Good.]
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There’s no excuse for this.
The new details on the latest White House paid liar’s misrepresentation of herself as a “lawyer” or “attorney” make her (and the decision to appoint her) appear worse and worse; she’s either a fraud or an idiot. In either case, she has lost all credibility. A paid liar must have credibility, as strange as that sounds.
Katie Zacharia confirmed yesterday that she had never passed a bar exam or and has never been an “attorney.”Then she claimed that she had not misrepresented her legal career by saying she “is” a lawyer. As I have explained already, she’s not. If many members of the public—you know, morons—think that a JD or LLB degree means one is a lawyer, that doesn’t excuse the holder of a law degree thinking or saying that. “Lawyer” means one can act as a lawyer—Duh!—and a mere law school graduate cannot. It is against the law for such a person to practice law, which is what lawyers do—again duh.
In interviews with The New York Times and Real America’s Voice, Zacharia said she had consulted Pepperdine’s president and “others” about how to describe her qualifications before appearing on television, and was told she could use the term “lawyer,” but not “attorney” or “esquire.” Zacharia hasn’t said which “president of Pepperdine” advised her. She graduated from law school there in 2011. Andrew K. Benton was the university’s president at that time. In 2019, Jim Gash became the president told the Times that he was not the one who advised her, though he did call her “a young woman of high integrity.” You know, a a young woman of high integrity who represented herself a lawyer without having a law license. Gash’s representative said “he does not comment on private conversations,” but a statement from Gash said: “Pepperdine is proud to count Katie among our alumni, former colleagues and friends. As she takes on this significant responsibility, we pray that God will grant her wisdom and courage. We look forward to seeing her use her incredible gifts and extensive experience in service to our nation.”
Got it. A non-responsive answer. A law degree from Pepperdine isn’t worth the paper it is printed on, and the school’s presidents are cowards and suck-ups.
Why is there any controversy over this, especially in the wake Democrats’ years-long cover-up of Biden’s galloping dementia and Mitch McConnell’s mysteriously long recovery from “a fall”?
Talk about “protesting too much”…the North State Journal (NSJ) asked former Gov. Roy Cooper’s Senate campaign if he was committed to fulfilling his six-year term if elected in November and if there were any health problems that might impede him. Cooper is 69 years old, so a six year term would take him to 75. NSJ had previously emailed those questions to Cooper’s campaign eight times without answers, and after the ninth time, it received a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action.
The Elias Law Group sent the letter. The firm is run by Marc Elias, the former campaign lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential run and a frequent target of Prof. Turley. The inquiring letter stated, “Governor Cooper intends to complete his entire term, and any suggestion that he is ‘experiencing a neurological issue,’ or that any health condition would prevent him from completing his term, is categorically false and defamatory.”
The NSJ asked Cooper’s Republican opponent Michael Whatley who is more than a decade younger than Cooper the same questions and the Whatley campaign said he would complete his term and that he didn’t have any health issues. Why is that so hard? Meanwhile, since when is a reporter or news organization asking a question “defamatory”? Insinuation in the form of a question isn’t usually held to be defamatory, especially from the news media, which is supposed to make people think and has broad protections under the First Amendment. I view this legal intimidation tactic as unethical—Don’t sue me, Marc, it’s just an opinion!—and Cooper siccing lawyers—you know, professionals who have graduated from law school AND who are members in good standing of a state bar after passing the bar exam?—-on an outlet for asking a question he apparently doesn’t want to answer to be signature significance: no trustworthy candidate would do that, ever, even once.
In related and gobsmacking news, Republican Iowa Senator Chuck Grassleysaid yesterday that he has not decided whether he will seek reelection in 2028. He is 93 years old. It is only moral luck that he has stayed healthy and able to serve in his current term, which was irresponsible for him to seek in 2022 when he was 89, and indefensible for voters to allow. In fact, I believe running for national office after 75 is unethical for our laws to allow. At least Grassley will answer questions about his age and health without trying to censor news reporting.
You can read all about the investigations and arguments over terminology many places. The Washington Post’s is a good as any, but its headline is crap. “Katie Zacharia calls herself a lawyer. Legal experts aren’t sure.”
Really? Ethics experts are. She’s a JD, meaning she has a diploma from a law school. That no more allows her to practice law than a diploma from medical school allows a grad to do brain surgery. She hasn’t passed a bar exam in any jurisdiction. She’s not a lawyer. Representing herself as a lawyer is a misleading statement and dishonesty (or stupidity). All by itself it is grounds for a bar association to decide that she lacks the character to practice law.
Trump’s Truth Social post about her selection to replace Karoline Leavitt described Zacharia as “a distinguished Graduate of Pepperdine University, and the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law, an attorney, and a frequent Commentator on outlets, including Fox News and Newsmax.” Wrong. Either Trump was misinformed or he doesn’t know what an attorney is. Technically, an attorney is a lawyer who represents a client, but the distinction between lawyer and attorney has gone the way of the distinction between “implied” and “inferred.” Either way, a JD degree doesn’t allow you to practice law and you aren’t either a lawyer or an attorney until you pass a bar exam and get a license. Fox News has identified Zacharia as a lawyer at least 18 times since March 2025. Same as with Trump: Fox News is misinformed or stupid. She isn’t a lawyer.
Zacharia’s LinkedIn profile says she was “General Counsel” for a nonprofit organization called “Fix California.” If she was, she was practicing law without a license, a bright-line ethics violation as well as illegal. She also claims to have been licensed to practice in China, which is interesting but irrelevant. It would not make her a lawyer in the U.S. any more than being chef in China does
The conclusion here is clear and unavoidable. Zacharia has been misrepresenting herself. It is no less serious than lying on a resumé. Such a gross misrepresentation is a serious ethical breach, and in my view, disqualifies her from getting a law license. She may have the job of White House paid liar, but even that job requires some level of credibility and trustworthiness. She doesn’t have either; she can’t have either.
If you watch any legal-themed TV shows, sooner or later a lawyer will say, “I can’t do that. I would be disbarred.” That is a scriptwriters fantasy. Probably they think it’s true; almost everyone does. In the vast majority of cases, violating the Rules of Professional Conduct, the so-called “Law of Lawyering,” will not result in disbarment, or a long suspension, a short suspension, or any bar discipline at all. this is true even for serious and repeated violations.
I have been dealing with the issue for more than a year, and will soon go public, meaning public beyond Ethics Alarms, which is, as I am constantly told, an obscure, little-read, typo-prone dinosaur mostly frequented by irrelevant Boomers like myself. The lawyers are permitted by the courts to be self-regulating on the heart-warming theory that it is a profession, and thus worthy of public trust. Many years ago the legendary and wise Judge Richard Posner, thelegal scholar who was until his retirement a star United States circuit judge who served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, observed that bar associations were unacceptably conflicted as the supposed enforcers of legal ethics standards. Like all associations, he said, their main concern is the welfare of their members, not the public. I have discovered that he was more right than I, or anyone who would admit it, ever suspected.
Maybe Judge Posner didn’t know how much of a sham the legal discipline system is. Now I do.
Bar associations are grievously under-funded and understaffed to perform the job of policing the profession with even minimal proficiency. They also don’t try very hard. The bar association websites are usually badly designed, and the pages devoted to the disciplinary system are so confusing and verbose I suspect the intention is to make filing a complaint so burdensome for members of the public that they will just give up. Lawyers have contempt for client complaints, and so do bar association officials. The public doesn’t understand legal ethics, and confuses malpractice with ethics violations. Client complaints tend to be badly written, rambling and over-long, and arrive with the presumption of incompetence. Phone calls for guidance will never reach a live person, just infuriating phone trees now made more annoying with “AI agents.” You leave a number and are promised a call back, which may never come.
Lawyer complaints, which the rules (Rule 8.3) say bar members must file when they have substantial reason to believe that another lawyer has committed acts that “call into question the lawyer’s honesty, trustworthiness or fitness to practice in other respects,” are a tiny percentage of the number of complaints reality should demand. That rule is derisively called “the Snitch Rule,” and lawyers seldom report colleagues, firm members or friends. They do report adversaries, and thus the state bars take those complaints with many grains of metaphorical salt, just as they do complaints from clients
That’s tainted Special Counsel Jack Smith wearing an anti-Trump shirt last week.
Nothing says independent, non partisan, fair, objective and unbiased like appearing in public billboarding a message attacking the official you were supposed to investigate.
At least he’s a defiant, transparent unethical prosecutor.
I alluded to my post on the old Ethics Scoreboard about the infamous Duke lacrosse team rape case in a recent EA post, suggesting that it may be a template for what we are going to see transpire in the still developing Cornell frat house gang rape saga. Fred Davidson, a cherished reader and commenter here, tracked down the essay on The Wayback Machine and sent the link in the comments. I’m reposting that essay here. If ever a prosecutor was a candidate to be just as unethical as Mike Nifong (who was disbarred), Letitia James is it. I want to acknowledge my webmaster for Ethics Alarms who edited and formatted all my posts, the talented Lauren Larson.Would that she was still working with me now.
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From the North Carolina Bar’s Rules of Professional Conduct:
“The prosecutor represents the sovereign and, therefore, should use restraint in the discretionary exercise of government powers, such as in the selection of cases to prosecute. During trial, the prosecutor is not only an advocate, but he or she also may make decisions normally made by an individual client, and those affecting the public interest should be fair to all. In our system of criminal justice, the accused is to be given the benefit of all reasonable doubt. With respect to evidence and witnesses, the prosecutor has responsibilities different from those of a lawyer in private practice; the prosecutor should make timely disclosure to the defense of available evidence known to him or her that tends to negate the guilt of the accused, mitigate the degree of the offense, or reduce the punishment. Further, a prosecutor should not intentionally avoid pursuit of evidence merely because he or she believes it will damage the prosecutor’s case or aid the accused.“
How Durham District Attorney Mike Nifong can reconcile his handling of the Duke lacrosse rape case with this explanatory comment from his bar association’s rule governing the ethics of prosecutors is a mystery. But it is no mystery what his violation of these principles has created: one of the worst ethics train wrecks of the past ten years, a mess that can stand with such recent ethics fiascos as the Terri Schiavo dispute and the Valerie Plame Affair. In fact, Nifong’s handiwork may have caused more human wreckage than either of these. But like all ethics train wrecks, this one had more than one shaky hand on the throttle:
The Duke lacrosse team: While not earning their horrific treatment by Nifong, many of the players on the team were irresponsible in their conduct, disrespectful to the hired exotic dancer who ultimately became their accuser, and reckless in their disregard for the reputation of the university and its sometimes contentious relations with the Durham community. For example, a few hours after the alleged rape, team member Ryan McFadyen sent an email to his team mates in which he fantasized about murdering and sexually abusing strippers. It may well have been composed as a tasteless joke, but it was certainly evidence of an unacceptable level of contempt and callousness toward the human beings the team had hired to entertain them at the party, not to mention strong evidence of a brain-pan insufficiency. McFadyen was suspended after a team mate, in another ethically questionable move, decided to circulate the disgusting e-mail so that it wound up in the hands of the police and, worse still, the media. Did it have any probative value in the case? No—McFadyen wasn’t one of the players implicated or indicted. Still, he ended up suspended from school, the local media used the e-mail to make the team look like a tribe of cannibals, and the seeds of racial conflict were sown and fertilized. The e-mail effectively threw gasoline on an already incendiary situation, and contributed mightily to the lacrosse team’s coach resigning and Duke canceling the lacrosse season.
Westlaw describes judicial estoppel thusly (readers here at EA are familiar with the principle of ethics estoppel):
A common law doctrine that prevents a party from taking a position that is contrary to a position the party took in an earlier legal proceeding. The purpose of judicial estoppel is to protect the integrity of the judicial process by preventing a party from gaining an unfair advantage or imposing an unfair detriment on the opposing party in a later proceeding. A court will typically invoke judicial estoppel where the earlier position was accepted by the court and the later position is clearly contradictory.
After spending the entire six-week triple-murder trial of the Massachusetts mother accused of killing her three young children (above) arguing that Clancy was legally insane and not responsible for her actions, Kevin Reddington argued in a hearing yesterday,”What actions?”
“Where is the evidence that she did this?” Reddington asked the same judge who presided over the mistrial. The attorney claimed that the DNA and fingerprint evidence were “woefully deficient,” that the prosecution’s timeline was “ridiculous,” and the police investigation was inadequate.
Of course, his client did send her husband out on an errand from which he returned an hour later to find his children strangled. She did confess to the murders; she had been behaving erratically and was under treatment, and there is no plausible explanation for the kids death-by-exercise bands other than the fact that their mother did it. “In this case, there was no investigation. They just immediately assumed that this woman was guilty,” Reddington said.
Gee, I wonder why.
In the first trial, Reddington didn’t dispute the charges in any way, and conceded that his client was the killer. The attorney blames the judge, arguing that the fact that Judge Sullivan denied his request to bifurcate the trial, Part I to decide whether she was guilty of murder and Part II to determine if she was if she was not guilty by reason of insanity, put him in a “conundrum” of having to admit she carried out the crimes in order to put forth the insanity defense. That’s why he argued in the first trial that his client had been in the throes of severe postpartum psychosis when she snapped after she had imagined a voice commanding her to kill the children and herself.
Nice try, Counselor. The Hail Mary strategy isn’t unethical; it’s just zealous representation. No lawyers consulted about the hearing think Reddington’s gambit is going to work. The judge is not going to dismiss the case. If there is another trial, and there had better be, will he argue this time that she didn’t murder her children and then attempt suicide? What will be the theory, that a maniac somehow got into the house, killed the kids without leaving any sign he had been there, that Clancy tried to kill herself in her grief and trauma and now can’t remember the attack? Or will he try the insanity defense again?
I suspect that Reddington knows the next jury won’t be packed with women who see Clancy as a victim of a patriarchal society that forces women to bear children they don’t want, and that her prospects of being acquitted are dimming. Stay tuned.
An awful event that could have been avoided in many ways if even one of the key players had just behaved responsibly and ethically, or knew what behaving responsibly and ethically is…
Bert Atienza, 77, was shopping at Walmart with his wife after church a week ago when store a 17-year-old store employee rushed down the aisle narrowly missing Josephine Atienza with a cart. Bert sharply admonished the young woman, saying, “You almost hit my wife with your heavy cart, and you did not even say excuse me or apologize to her,” according to his wife in interviews after the event. The African- American staffer argued with him briefly and then tossed a can at the couple as they walked away. Minutes later Travis White and Erika Mitchell attacked Bert as their daughter, the reckless employee, watched according to store surveillance video. [Note:Accounts say they “allegedly” attacked him. It it’s on video, it happened, unless the claim is that the video is a “deep fake.” I hate that reflex news media characterization. (‘John Wilkes Booth allegedly shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theater in front of hundreds of witnesses…’) Even the attorney for White and Mitchell doesn’t dispute the attack].
The two parents shoved Atienza from the back, one punched him in the face, then they pushed him into the shelving unit. After he fell to the ground, as one of the attackers kicked him. “While he’s on the floor, they’re still kicking him and I told them stop. My husband has heart problems,” Josephine said.
Oh! We’re sorry, if we knew the 77-year-old man had heart problems, we never would have attacked him!
Bert Atienza lost consciousness before help arrived and he was rushed to a hospital where he died the next day. White and Mitchell were arrested days later and charged with second-degree murder. Their daughter (described as “no longer employed by Walmart”—ya think?) has also been charged with assault and battery, aggravated malicious wounding and conspiracy to commit a felony. Her name has not been released to the press because she is a minor.
Ugh. The Lindsay Clancy Ethics Train Wreck is a particularly ugly one getting uglier by the minute.
We began with a triple child murder and the abortion-addled women who think the murderer is a heroic figure for showing why it’s a good thing to kill babies before they are born (so you don’t have to kill them later). Then we had jury misconduct, as it was revealed drip-drip-drip style by a series of individual juror interviews in which we learned that a nurse on the jury introduced her own expert testimony into the evidence ( forbidden), and that a lone juror holding out for a guilty verdict was wrongly targeted by the jury foreman to get him off the jury so the murderous mother could be acquitted.
I believe that while not a technical ethics violation, the judge reading the Foreman’s note in open court rather than only to the lawyers was irresponsible and incompetent. No one outside of the lawyers and the jurors needed to know what the impasse was, and the judge adding that detail made the Lone Juror a likely target.
Next, the defense attorney publicly vilified the hold-out juror. Prof. Turley correctly condemned that act by Attorney Kevin Reddington, but failed to mention that it was an ethics violation: Rule 8.4, “Misconduct” forbids Massachusetts lawyers from engaging “in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice.” Sending the message to future perspective jurors that they risk being publicly attacked and denigrated for doing their civic duty is potentially disastrous to the administration of justice. I’m a Massachusetts lawyer: I may file a complaint against Reddington. In fact, I will.
Yet another juror seemed to say that a majority of the women on the jury were determined to acquit Clancy from the beginning of deliberations, and perhaps from the outset of the trial. She also seemed to suggest that she had been pressured to change her vote and didn’t have the integrity to stand up for what she believed…unlike the Lone Juror.
After the defense counsel’s ethics breach, Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz addressed the media and engaged in prosecutorial misconduct. He stated that the investigation did not establish postpartum depression as the cause of the killings, maintained that Clancy was in control of her actions and that first-degree murder charges remain justified. In response to suggestions that the state was being insensitive to postpartum mental health issues, Cruz said, “Insensitive is killing three children” and that the prosecution’s job is to give a voice to those “who can no longer speak for themselves.” He added that the evidence gathered in the investigation showed that Clancy made a “cruel and calculated” decision and was legally responsible for her actions during the homicides. Massachusetts Rule 3.8. “Special Duties of Prosecutors,” forbids prosecutors from “making extrajudicial comments that have a substantial likelihood of heightening public condemnation of the accused.”
I may file a complaint against Cruz, too.
[Oh: when I tried to find Mass. Rules of Professional Conduct 3.8 online, I got a message that said I was not authorized to view the page! Well, I guess that’s one way to avoid having your unethical prosecutors exposed…]
But wait! There’s more…
Reddington asked for the President to pardon Clancy. The President can’t pardon a defendant in a state prosecution, and as a lawyer, Reddington must know that. His plea was misleading grandstanding, and dishonest, designed to mislead the public.
I’ll add that to my ethics complaint.
And this, from Oprah…
Black woman argues that black women who murder their kids deserve support too, not just white women. The entire room of women cheers deliriously. This is mass psychosis. pic.twitter.com/xSZLJFqwRC
By all means, white women shouldn’t be the only ones privileged to kill their children…
We also learned that from juror Paula Devlin on ‘CBS Mornings’ today that the Lone Juror who voted to find Clancy guilty of murdering her children was the sole black on the jury. Oprah’s gal-pal Gayle King, who has never displayed to me any particular talent or acumen justifying her position as a CBS morning hostess other than her relationship with O, was stunned:
King: A black man is the holdout juror?
Devlin: Yes.
King: Well, I have to sit with that for just a second.
Why does she have to sit with that for a second? Black men are not supposed to vote guilty in criminal trials? Black men are supposed to be sympathetic to child killers? Black men are supposed to bend to the will of white women?
I was glad to see the often rogue Democrat/Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema leave Congress and my ethics scrutiny because she was a one-woman EA spelling landmine: I always wanted to spell her first name “Krysten” and her last name “Cinema.” But a federal judge last week cleared the way for a the wife of a man she had been having an affair with while she was a U.S. Senator to litigate a North Carolina “homewrecker” lawsuit against her.
Good.
To be fair, Ethics Alarms had extolled Sinema a couple times in the past, most recently in 2021, when I wrote:
“Totalitarianism takes a hit! Is it fatal? Senator Krysten Sinema (D-Az) is suddenly evil in the eyes of progressives hoping to ram through SCOTUS packing, gun restrictions, D.C. statehood, HR One and other measures designed to make the US a one party, European-style nanny state until the stars turn cold. She announced that she is unalterably opposed to eliminating the filibuster, meaning that it’s probably here to stay, at least for a while. The ethical response to this development would be for the two parties to stop insisting on extreme positions, and work toward compromises, as our system was designed to foster. Nah.”
Nonetheless, Sinema carried on a sexual affair with her bodyguard (heh!), leading to his divorce. Sinema’s lawyers had asked U.S. District Judge David A. Bragdon to toss the suit, arguing she had no meaningful ties to North Carolina and had conducted her affair with Matthew Ammel entirely in other states. Bragdon, rejected that account in a 13-page order.
