Her tenure as White House press secretary was record breaking. While Anthony Scaramucci served for a fleeting 11 days in the role during President Trump’s first administration, Katie Zacharia lasted just five.
Hand-picked from virtual obscurity by Trump himself last week, Zacharia’s dismal first press briefing on Monday lasted only 14 minutes and soon snowballed into an unstoppable disaster as questions were raised over her credentials as a lawyer and even her years spent living in China.
She never made it to the podium a second time.
On Friday, the 41-year-old former communications advisor from Trump’s media company was summoned to meet the president, who handled the situation with uncharacteristic tenderness.
‘You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,’ Trump told Zacharia. ‘Honestly if I were you I’d reconsider.’
Zacharia, said allies, knew it was over. She had arrived at the White House ready for an ‘ambush’.
Soon after that meeting, White House communications director Steven Cheung made it official, stating that Zacharia will be ‘transitioning into a new role that will be announced at a later date.’
Cheung, it was noted, had just days ago loudly insisted that ‘up and down the White House, everyone has been thoroughly impressed with Katie in just a few short days on the job.’ He had dismissed reports stating otherwise as ‘trash’.
On Friday, 41-year-old Zacharia was summoned to meet the president. ‘You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,’ Trump told her. ‘Honestly if I were you I’d reconsider.’
‘She’ll be remembered as one of the all-time greats,’ he concluded in a perhaps ill-judged tweet on Wednesday.
But while the president had been the one to wield the axe – albeit one handled with kid gloves – the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal that it was actually Cheung’s boss, Trump’s redoubtable chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who orchestrated the execution.
Nicknamed Trump’s ‘ice maiden’, Wiles had been completely bypassed by the president in the decision to hire Zacharia, it has been reported.
And as the scandal worsened this week – with a slew of headlines particularly focused on whether Zacharia had misrepresented herself as a lawyer (Trump had called her ‘an attorney’ despite the fact she failed her bar exam) – the press secretary turned to the usually conservative-friendly TV network Fox News in an apparent attempt to quash the onslaught.
But on Thursday night, Zacharia was caught off guard in a cross-examination by host Sean Hannity, who repeatedly challenged her in a live segment.
Hannity told Zacharia that her shaky first press briefing, in which she appeared unsteady as she read her script, had been ‘widely panned’.
He also grilled her over her legal credentials, with Zacharia struggling to defend herself saying, ‘I knew I would be living in China and the result of the bar would be inconsequential.’ (After law school and her failure to pass the bar, Zacharia lived in Beijing from 2011 to 2013 with her husband, who took a job there at a private equity firm.)
Sources close to Zacharia said she felt particularly wounded by the interaction with Hannity, who she had considered an ally.
But, undeterred, she appeared Friday morning for a second scheduled interview with Fox & Friends.
That segment wasn’t exactly cordial, either.
‘Do you wish you would have disclosed to the president about not passing the bar?’ co-host Lawrence Jones said straight off the bat.
The interviews, sources say, hit like a double punch – and the fists belonged to Susie Wiles.
‘Susie gave Fox News the kill order, but Zacharia was an obviously bad choice. This was totally predictable,’ said a senior administration official.
‘Somebody at the White House set her up for a trap in that interview. It only could have been Susie or the president himself. Nobody else is going to be able to make that call to Hannity,’ a second senior administration official told the Daily Mail.
‘When Sean does that, it sends a message that if she can’t handle Fox being a little tough, she’s not going to be able to handle CNN.’
But while the president had been the one to wield the axe, the Daily Mail can exclusively reveal that it was actually Trump’s redoubtable chief of staff, Susie Wiles (left), who orchestrated the execution.
Sources close to Zacharia said she felt particularly wounded by her interview with Sean Hannity, who she had considered an ally.
‘She had Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Three days to figure out how to answer a question about her law degree. And she couldn’t,’ said a third source close to the president.
‘She wasn’t going to hack it as press secretary if it was going to take her three days to explain her resumé. Hannity gave her every chance to pivot and she couldn’t pivot. It’s her fault. It’s not the president’s fault. He’s saddened by this. He actually likes her. He wanted to give her a dignified exit.’
Fox News insiders pushed back on the notion of a ‘kill order’, saying it was clear by the end of the Hannity interview that Zacharia had done herself in.
In a statement a spokesperson for the network said: ‘Sean Hannity decides who he interviews and what he asks his guests, period. That’s been true for three decades, through several administrations, and that authenticity is why he’s been number one for nearly 30 years.’
Zacharia told the Daily Mail: ‘President Trump is such a kind, wonderful, gracious, thoughtful, enthusiastic and hardworking man – I wish more Americans appreciated him. There’s nobody who will ever come close to making America great the way he has and is. It was an honor to work for him.’
Wiles is now said to be once again eyeing her previous first choice to replace Karoline Leavitt, who unexpectedly stepped down as press secretary in August: Scott Jennings, the Trump-friendly CNN contributor who made a name as a lone conservative voice on the liberal network.
A former Trump official confirmed Jennings is now the frontrunner to replace Zacharia. Jennings did not comment.
As the tide quickly turned on Zacharia this week, with some inside the White House openly expressing their doubts, Trump initially defended his decision, praising her bumbling first press briefing as ‘excellent’ on Tuesday.
By Friday morning, the mood had changed, with Politico reporting that, prior to his meeting with Zacharia in which he urged her to step down, Trump had privately told other officials that ‘she had no talent and shouldn’t be on television’.
In public, he kept the kid gloves on.
‘I told her, “I think you’re better off being happy.” And I’m not sure you can ever be happy in this job,’ Trump told reporters. ‘I want her to have a good life.’
