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.
