Trump Press Secretary Katie Zacharia Lived in China While Her Husband Helped an Investment Firm Expand Into North Korea

When Katie Zacharia took the White House podium for the first time on 13 October, the questions that followed were about a bar exam she says she passed in China. Less examined was what took her there. She had moved to Beijing with her husband, Tyler Zacharia, whose private equity firm was, over the same years, lending money to companies inside North Korea.

Zacharia lived in Beijing from 2011 to 2013, where her husband was a vice president at the firm then known as Schulze Global Investments, later SGI Frontier Capital. By the time she arrived, it had been active in one of the world's most sanctioned economies for three years.

What the Firm Did in North Korea

Tyler Zacharia's biography on the 2521 Entertainment website, where he is now chief operations officer, says he spent eight years in Beijing with Schulze Global and helped the firm build teams across Mongolia, Ethiopia, Brazil, and North Korea. His LinkedIn profile, listing the job from 2007 to 2013, names China, Mongolia, and Brazil, but not North Korea. Neither says what the work there involved.

What the firm did there was set out by Forbes in 2011, in a report that did not name him. The magazine said Schulze Global made three loans to North Korean mining companies in 2008, each worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, all repaid.

In the summer of 2011, the year Katie Zacharia arrived in Beijing, it lent a further $1 million (£756,000) so a North Korean conglomerate could buy corn for its workers.

The founder, Gabriel Schulze, a great-great-grandson of Newmont Mining founder William Boyce Thompson, ran the family office from Beijing and was separately trying to bring Coca-Cola to Pyongyang. He put that venture at no more than $10 million (£7.6 million), with his firm's share at $2 million (£1.5 million). Coca-Cola said none of its representatives had explored business in North Korea. The loans, Schulze said, 'opened the doors' to the idea.

Lending Into a Sanctioned Economy

The loans were made while US sanctions on North Korea were in force. The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control says its current sanctions programme began with an executive order in June 2008, and it issued the North Korea Sanctions Regulations in November 2010. Schulze consulted US sanctions lawyers before lending and filed notices with the Treasury, according to Forbes, which reported no violation.

Writing for the Peterson Institute for International Economics on 10 October 2011, the North Korea economist Stephan Haggard said Schulze's earlier dealings would now be illegal under the sanctions order President Barack Obama signed that year. On 16 October 2011, he corrected that, writing that the conclusion was not warranted by the evidence and that he was not saying anything Schulze did was illegal. No enforcement action has been reported.

Katie Zacharia's Own China Chapter

Zacharia, who has described herself as a lawyer throughout her media career, worked as an associate at Zhong Lun Law Firm in Beijing from 2011 to 2013 and handled fundraising and communications for the non-profit Compassion for Migrant Children, her LinkedIn shows. The couple married in 2011.

Asked by a reporter which state she passed the bar exam in, she replied, 'When I moved to China.' A search of attorney records across California, New York, Texas, Florida, and Washington, DC by the South China Morning Post found no listing for her, and independent journalist Judd Legum reported finding no evidence she had been admitted in any US state.

A White House official said she had relocated after law school to join her husband, whose job was with an American private equity firm, and that she worked on international transaction law while there. The official did not say whether she passed the bar exam.

Trump named Zacharia to the podium on 9 October, replacing Karoline Leavitt. She had been a senior communications adviser at Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs Truth Social, and a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman earlier in the year.

Her husband left SGI in July 2013 for film production, with credits including Martin Scorsese's Silence and The Irishman. Cerberus Capital Management bought the firm in November 2018, and Schulze became a senior managing director there.

The White House has so far answered only for Zacharia's legal credentials, not her husband's business in Beijing or the loans his firm made to North Korea while she was living there.