Katie Zacharia’s time as White House press secretary lasted less than a week. Critics say her goodbye post may now cause trouble for President Donald Trump in court.
Zacharia lost the job Friday, five days after she started, CBS News reported. That evening she posted a photo of herself standing beside Trump at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.
“President Trump is a kind, wonderful, gracious, thoughtful, enthusiastic, and hardworking man,” she wrote. “It was an honor to work for him.”
Viewers soon spotted something else in the picture. A blurry map sits on top of a stack of blue binders on Trump’s desk.
“That blurred out map on POTUS’s desk…” wrote Konstantin Toropin, a Pentagon reporter for the Associated Press and former reporter with Military.com.
Aaron Fritschner, deputy chief of staff to Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), said he knew the spot. “It’s Hains Point and East Potomac Park,” he wrote. He said that if you turn the photo to Trump’s view, “you can see Buckeye Drive running straight across.”
East Potomac Golf Links, a public course that’s about a century old, is at the center of a federal lawsuit over Trump’s plan to rebuild it. On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes temporarily blocked the National Park Service from cutting down more trees there. Crews had already taken out about 430. The administration has argued in court that the cutting carries out a 2019 landscape report and has nothing to do with Trump’s redesign.
Navy veteran and political commentator Travis Akers said the photo cuts against that claim.
“The Trump administration has argued there is no ‘final plan’ in court documents, but this map and trees being removed would suggest there is a plan and direction is coming straight from Trump,” Akers wrote. He added that Zacharia “may have inadvertently provided additional evidence in the court case.”
Save East Po, the advocacy group fighting the overhaul, agreed. “FYI to anyone paying attention - that blurred out map on the PRESIDENT’S DESK is East Potomac Park,” the group wrote.
The progressive media outlet MeidasTouch said Zacharia “may have just handed the federal judge evidence of exactly where the order came from.”