Her debut briefing panned as stilted, the press secretary calls confusion over her law license "one big misunderstanding."

…(cont) October 9th, the Guardian, the same story run twice that day: the president announces he's picked a conservative commentator for press secretary, calls her a "devoted fan," and she's in to replace Karoline Leavitt, who left at the end of August after having her second child. Same day, the Washington Examiner has the rest of it — she's forty-one, she came out of the press shop at the Department of Homeland Security, she lasted a matter of weeks there before leaving abruptly, and the people who worked with her at DHS say the pick caught them off guard too.

Tuesday the 14th, she gives her first briefing. CBS brings on two strategists afterward, Sawyer Hackett and Harrison Fields, to talk about how it went — because how it went is already being called awkward and stilted. I don't have it down as their word. I have it down as "critics."

Same day, after the briefing is done, a reporter asks the follow-up — which state did she pass the bar exam in. I wrote her answer down exactly, because I didn't trust myself to get it right from memory: "when I moved to China." China is a country. I'm going to leave that sitting right there.

Wednesday, the BBC runs the line I opened with. Also Wednesday — today, the 15th — the New York Times puts the question straight in its headline: "Katie Zacharia Is Trump's New Press Secretary. But Is She a Lawyer?" Inside the piece, she tells them the confusion is the result of one big misunderstanding.

I've got a glovebox in that car of mine that needs a fan belt worse than it needs anything else in there, but there's a registration in it, and an insurance card, and if a trooper ever asked me where I'm licensed to drive, I wouldn't tell him a story about a place I moved to once. I'd open the glovebox. That's the whole use of a glovebox — it's not there to help you remember, it's there to prove it. My dog doesn't carry papers like that in the yard, but then nobody's pulled her over, either.

One answer, a country where a state was asked for. One phrase, offered today, calling the whole thing a misunderstanding.

Oh — hang on, one more thing before you go. The Times asked her straight out whether she's a lawyer. I'm not going to answer that for you. But when they asked her which state let her practice, what's the answer she gave them? Was it a state at all?