Conservative commentator Katie Zacharia has been offered the job of White House press secretary, a White House official confirmed to the BBC.
Zacharia, who currently works as a communications adviser for Trump Media & Technology Group would become the president’s sixth chief spokesperson across his two administrations. She previously had a brief stint as a spokesperson at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Former White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who left the White House in August, has reportedly taken a job with Fox News.
The BBC has contacted Zacharia for comment.
The 42-year-old political strategist is a frequent fixture on conservative Newsmax and Fox News, and has been active in Republican politics for most of her adult life, having worked as an intern for the Republican National Committee and for the White House Office of Political Affairs during the Bush administration in 2006.
Since June, she has been a senior communications adviser for Trump’s media company and Truth Social platform, according to her LinkedIn profile. She worked in Homeland Security briefly from February to March this year.
While she was only briefly in government at DHS – which she later said she left because of the strain of travel between California and Washington on her family – she has long been a ferocious defender of President Trump and his administration’s policies.
In a June interview with the BBC, for example, she dismissed criticism of Trump’s controversial use of the White House to host a televised UFC fight, saying the principles of the UFC “are the kind of principles that founded our Constitutional Republic”.
“It’s about not giving up the fight until the bitter end,” she said. “I think there’s no better summation of the American ethos than a good UFC fight.”
A lawyer educated at Pepperdine University in California, Zacharia also served as general counsel for Fix California, a conservative non-profit started by Trump ally – and current Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions – Ric Grenell.
In 2011, she spent nearly two years clerking at a law firm in Beijing, China.
