White House ends forty-day briefing blackout with fourteen minutes, three friendly reporters, and a press secretary who answered "when I moved to China" when asked where she passed the bar; normal briefings resumed Tuesday and concluded Friday.

…(cont) Then a question was shouted in the hallway afterward — which state did she pass the bar exam in — and the answer, as the Guardian printed it on Wednesday, was "when I moved to China." Now, the jurisdiction being referred to there is — China is not a jurisdiction. China is a country, and the California bar does not sit in it. That is not what I meant to say. What was being referred to was a stretch of a career, and that is the account she gave the Hill on Thursday: she misheard, and assumed the question was, "Where were you after law school?" Shouted questions get misheard. I have misheard them in this building.

On Wednesday the Campaign for Accountability filed a complaint with the State Bar of California asking it to investigate whether she had broken state law by falsely identifying herself as a lawyer. Pepperdine confirms the law degree, 2011. The BBC reported Thursday that she does not appear to be registered to the legal bar in any state where she has lived, and the White House defended her that day, because the degree is real, and because she had said she practiced international transaction law, "with all the appropriate credentials." She told the New York Times on Thursday that the confusion was one big misunderstanding. It was. Thursday she told Sean Hannity she had not passed the bar exam. The New York Post reported she failed the California exam after Pepperdine in 2011. The president had described her as an attorney. A misunderstanding, once cleared up, is still the thing we called it.

Friday, a White House press official said she was "let go," after the president signaled she was on her way out. The Guardian had the five days, from an official not authorized to speak publicly. And five days is not a tenure, it is a transition, it is — no. Five days is the tenure. Picked on the ninth, briefed on the thirteenth, gone on the sixteenth, and that is the whole of it. I would still call it a transition.

RTÉ wrote Friday that a Scaramucci has been replaced by a shorter unit of time. For context, the unit was set in July 2017, when a press secretary announced he would resign over the communications director's appointment and stepped down in August.

The position stands: the lectern is operational. It is the personnel that is between occupants, less than a month before the midterms, while the president travels the country for Republican candidates. The briefing room is open. We will take questions as soon as there is someone authorized to answer them.