BRIEF ENCOUNTER

Fox Host Melts Down at Criticism of Trump’s New Mouthpiece

Sean Hannity claimed the “legacy media mob” is “out for blood” after Katie Zacharia’s 14-minute debut at the podium.

Fox News veteran Sean Hannity was all but foaming at the mouth as he tried to defend Donald Trump’s new press secretary after her car-crash debut at the White House.

Katie Zacharia’s first outing as Trump’s official mouthpiece lasted just 14 minutes, the 41-year-old taking three questions before abruptly cutting the briefing short.

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On Tuesday night’s Hannity, the Fox News host portrayed it as a perfectly normal performance and attacked “so-called journalists” who reported on it.

“We have an abusively biased, corrupt news media in this country, the legacy media mob as I affectionately refer to them,” Hannity said.

“They are not interested in real questions and real answers. They are out for blood.”

Hannity, 64, rested his case on a single exchange. It was the only moment from Zacharia’s debut that he showed his viewers.

In the clip from the briefing, Fox’s own Peter Doocy noted that the midterms are three weeks away. “Is your job just to speak about White House matters or is it to make things less tough for Republicans in the midterms?” he asked.

Zacharia sidestepped the midterms entirely, sticking instead to praise for Trump.

“I’m hoping to amplify, multiply, and expand upon President Trump’s incredible agenda for the American people,” she said.

“All right, a perfectly normal question and answer,” Hannity declared once the tape ended.

Then, he listed the attacks on her.

“Zacharia’s been mocked. She’s been attacked over her appearance, her hair, the way she spoke,” he said.

“They questioned her intelligence, her credentials. They even asked about her bar exam.”

“With Zacharia, the blowback was immediate. It was nasty,” he went on. “And all of this from a group of people that claim to champion women in the workplace.”

The bar exam question is real, and The Washington Post spent Tuesday chasing it.

Independent journalist Judd Legum first spotted the problem: Zacharia had never been admitted to practice in California, according to the Post.

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She does have a law degree. Pepperdine University told the paper she graduated from its law school in 2011.

Trump went further. When he unveiled her hire on Friday, he called her “an attorney,” the Post noted. Her LinkedIn profile also says she was once the top lawyer at Fix California, a group founded by Trump adviser Ric Grenell.

So the Post asked Zacharia point-blank which bar had admitted her. Her answer: China.

A Chinese license will not let you practice law in the United States. Attorneys must be admitted in one of the 50 states or Washington, D.C to practice.

It turns out that if she had obtained her license in China, she wouldn’t have even been able to practice there. The CCP doesn’t allow foreigners to represent clients in its courts, the Post pointed out.

The White House was no more enlightening.

It wouldn’t tell the Post whether Zacharia had ever worked as a lawyer on American soil. Instead, it offered a one-sentence account of her years abroad: “Katie moved to China with her husband after graduating because of his job at an American private equity firm while she worked on international transaction law.”

For all of Hannity’s talk of a mob out for blood, the same paper that pressed Zacharia on her law license was gentle, even forgiving about her performance.

The Post didn’t pin her stumbles on her hair, her voice or her gender. It pinned them on the calendar.

Zacharia had four days between her Friday unveiling and her first time at the lectern, the Post noted. Trump didn’t even loop in his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, four sources told the paper. Wiles and other senior aides only heard about the pick on Thursday night.

The Post even spelled out how hard a press secretary’s job is. She has to defend the administration, keep her facts straight, and think on her feet when an awkward subject comes up. That is a tall order for someone who had barely unpacked her new office.

Even some of Trump’s own aides wondered whether she’d had enough time to get ready, the paper reported.

In other words, one of the “legacy media” outlets Hannity was railing against gave Zacharia more benefit of the doubt than her own colleagues did.

The press pack Hannity derided also barely got a crack at her. All three questions she fielded came from right-leaning outlets, Breitbart News, Fox News, and the Daily Mail, according to the Post. Fox’s question about whether the administration had cut off intelligence-sharing with Ukraine got a promise that she would “have to get back to you on that.”

As for her looks, the sharpest jabs came from Hannity’s former colleague.

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Ex-Fox host Megyn Kelly went after Zacharia’s appearance, telling her to dial back the heavy makeup and curls. “You’re not there to turn anybody on. You’re there to look like a professional,” Kelly said.

“I know she’s auditioning for a job on Fox News. They all are,” she said,

She did cut Zacharia a little slack, saying the debut “was fine” and that she was “a little stumbly because she was nervous.”

Trump, for his part, was pleased. “I thought she was very good,” he told reporters on his way to Marine One, according to the Post.

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