White House press secretary gives three answers on where she passed the bar, passed none

…(cont) Same day, the Washington Examiner, two more lines. One says she spent several weeks earlier this year as deputy spokeswoman at the Department of Homeland Security before abruptly leaving. The other just asks who she is, plainly, which struck me as a fair question for a newspaper to be asking about someone about to stand at that podium every afternoon.

Nothing on the page again until this week, when her first televised briefing ran and the word that came back from the BBC, the Times, CBS, and the Guardian was some version of stilted. A complaint was already filed, asking whether the new press secretary is in fact a lawyer. That briefing has its own page. It's filed, it's dated, it stays where I put it.

This week's page is where the answer starts moving, and it moves three times before it lands anywhere.

Tuesday, a reporter shouts the question at her: where did you pass the bar exam. I wrote that down word for word, because a sentence like that you only need to copy once.

Except it didn't stop there. The New York Times asks the obvious follow-up — is she a lawyer, plainly — and gets, in her own words, one big misunderstanding. Then the Hill gets a third version: she says she misheard the shouted question altogether, that she thought the reporter had asked where she went after law school, not where she passed the bar. "I assumed the question was, 'Where were you after law school?'" That line isn't mine. I copied it straight off hers.

Three answers to one question, in order, in my own handwriting: China. A misunderstanding. A mishearing.

I've got a glovebox in that car that won't start half the winter, and in it there's a registration, an old insurance card, and an inspection sticker, and if you asked me which paper to believe, I could hand you three documents that don't agree with each other, because I never clean that thing out. My wife says I should just empty it and start over, and she's probably right, but that's a different column. Nobody's filing a complaint about my glovebox, though. Nobody put me at a podium either.

And here's the Post, same batch of stories, with the detail that's been sitting underneath the whole page the entire time: Pepperdine law school, 2011, and a California bar exam she did not pass.

I told myself I'd only bring the question up once, and then I went and brought it up two more times without telling you, so I owe you the honest accounting. Where did she pass the bar. China wasn't a where. The misunderstanding wasn't a where. The mishearing wasn't a where. Asked three times by three different outlets inside one week, and the page I'm holding still doesn't have a place written on it anywhere.

Before you go — the Post already wrote one down. California. She just didn't pass it there either.