To lawyer, or not to lawyer? That is the question. It’s been an eventful first week as White House press secretary Katie Zacharia, who you may know from her appearances as a “lawyer” on Fox News. Cockburn is careful to put the word in quotes, as his comrades in the mainstream media have been fixated on her bona fides for the last seven days.
Zacharia attended Pepperdine’s law school – but never passed a bar exam, a detail “inconsequential” to her status as a lawyer, she told Sean Hannity during an interview last night.
How much does that all matter, given that you do not need a law degree to be press secretary? For the job itself, not much. As for how you got the job, perhaps we should defer to Fox News regular Katie Pavlich. “Failing the California bar exam the first time is normal. Who cares? But this is not the issue,” she writes. “What is not normal is failing the exam and then lying for years about being a lawyer or attorney to get on television.” Goodness.
“Lying to the President of the United States about your résumé to land a job is a big deal,” Pavlich continues. “The President incorrectly and repeatedly stated she was an attorney because for years she said so. I’d hope more people would be upset about that. The issue is the dishonesty.”
How much of a role did Zacharia’s status as a “lawyer” play in her capacity to score TV hits? A cable news producer told Cockburn that Zacharia “appeared often as a legal expert,” but clarified, “if producers were looking for an attorney, they’d find an alternative who is actually an attorney.” Perhaps if Fox shared the producer’s level of scrutiny, we’d be seeing a different bottle blonde stumbling over her words at the podium in the days to come.
On our radar
MIDTERM DASH President Trump will hold rallies in Georgia and Kentucky today and tomorrow, and will also participate in an RNC event in Palm Beach, Florida.
SHOW’S CANCELED Trump has announced on Truth Social that the execution by firing squad of Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan will not be live-streamed after all. “Many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device,” Trump wrote.
BOWING OUT Justice Alito has confirmed that he is mulling retiring. “A great man!!!,” was Trump’s response. Alito’s early retirement would give Trump the chance to appoint a younger conservative justice.
What’s next for Kimberly Guilfoyle?
Kimberly Guilfoyle resigned as US Ambassador to Greece on Monday, after a string of stories about trading cash for influence. She is said to have asked a Trump donor to pay off her credit card debts in return for access to the administration, and there are also questions over her relationship with a Greek energy firm. Now that she’s an ex-ambassador, as well as ex-Fox News host and ex-fiancée of Donald Trump Jr., one of her former coworkers is sticking the knife in. Brave!
Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, who worked with Guilfoyle at Fox for several years, described how Guilfoyle would show her male conquests’ dick pics to colleagues. “Kimberly showed me and several of our friends pictures of [a man’s] Amex black card – front and back,” Kennedy wrote. “The images were matched with a corresponding picture of the card holder’s private parts.”
“Kimberly talked about sex so cavalierly that she made Samantha from Sex and the Cityseem like Greta Thunberg,” she added.
Kennedy also recounts an evening when she went to Kimberly’s home and her colleague opened the door wearing a “black, push-up corset and thigh-high stockings, and purred: ‘You like what you see?’”
Cockburn has heard enough. It’s time for Guilfoyle to run for Congress. Washington needs you.
Noem’s woes
After Kristi Noem was removed as Secretary of State for Homeland Security in March, she was given the consolation prize of being named Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas (SotA) – a then-protean international alliance against the drug cartels.
SotA has since grown in size and scope. Chile, Columbia and Peru have acceded – and Brazil may soon join them if Flávio Bolsonaro emerges victorious in the presidential election on October 25. In May the organization condemned the attempt to overthrow the Bolivian government, and in July it defended the integrity of the Colombian electoral process against allegations of rigging.
What has Noem’s role been in all this? Hard to say. After an initial diplomatic tour in the spring, the former DHS secretary seemed to go dark, resurfacing briefly in September. Now we learn that her envoy status has “expired,” according to a State Department spokesman. Noem will “continue to work on the Shield of the Americas portfolio” and has now been given the still-more ambiguous title of “senior advisor” to Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau. Whatever this new role entails, it is all a marked step down from the days when Noem was building vast Alcatraz-like prisons surrounded by moats full of crocodiles.
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