Judge Rules MSNBC Pundit Potentially Defamed Trump Attorney
A federal court in Washington, D.C., ruled an online claim made by a legal analyst at MSNBC against a former White House attorney in the Trump administration is potentially defamatory.
In September, U.S. District Court Judge Loren AliKhan denied a motion from MSNBC legal analyst and attorney Andrew Weissmann to dismiss a complaint filed by Stefan Passantino, who represented former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson before she became the Jan. 6 Committee’s star witness.
Passantino had previously served as head deputy ethics counsel in the Trump White House and was Hutchinson’s attorney when she was initially questioned by the House Democrats’ Soviet-style inquisition run by then-Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney. Hutchinson fired Passantino, who was being paid by the Save America PAC, when she decided to change her testimony before the House committee and make a series of outlandish claims immediately discredited by her own named sources.
Passantino sued Weissmann last year after the former deputy to Special Counsel Robert Mueller claimed the Trump-world attorney “coached her to lie.”
“This is an insidious lie,” Passantino’s lawsuit reads. “Ms. Hutchinson even testified, under penalty of law: ‘I want to make this clear to you: Stefan [Passantino] never told me to lie. … He told me not to lie.”
Hutchinson’s testimony can be found on page 42 of the publicly available transcript from her Sept. 14, 2022, interview with the Jan. 6 Committee. Passantino, instead, coached her as a standard fact witness to only answer questions she could recall. Passantino represented Hutchinson through her first three interviews with the committee before she changed counsel and appeared publicly. None of the transcripts dated Feb. 23, 2022, March 7, 2022, or May 17, 2022, show Passantino obstructing Hutchinson’s testimony. While the transcripts were also recorded, the Jan. 6 Committee destroyed the video.
Weissmann, however, charged Passantino with “coach[ing] her to lie” in a post to roughly 320,000 followers on X after CNN published a series of hit pieces that accused Passantino of pressuring Hutchinson to illegally manipulate her testimony.
On Dec. 21, 2022, CNN ran the first hit piece, which cited “sources familiar with the committee’s work” who alleged Passantino urged Hutchinson to mislead lawmakers. The network included a statement from Passantino, but made no reference to the transcript of Hutchinson’s Sept. 14 interview, in which she explicitly said he told her “not to lie.”
CNN ran another story on Dec. 22, 2022, this one headlined “Cassidy Hutchinson told the January 6 committee she felt pressure from Trump allies not to talk and instead risk ‘contempt.’”
“The final straw for former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson with her first attorney, paid through allies of former President Donald Trump, came when he told her to stop cooperating with the January 6 House select committee even if she risked a contempt of Congress charge, transcripts of her interviews and sources familiar with her testimony tell CNN,” the network reported.
The second story did link to Hutchinson’s nearly 140-page Sept. 14, 2022, transcript, which was embedded on the network’s website, and reported on her testimony that she was explicitly coached “not to lie” halfway through the story.
A recent report from House Republicans investigating the Jan. 6 Committee in October found that Hutchinson was communicating directly with Cheney without Passantino’s knowledge throughout his representation of her.
Three months after CNN’s stories were published and six months before Weissmann’s potentially defamatory post on X, the New York Times reported on “several dozen prominent legal figures, including past presidents of the American Bar Association and the District of Columbia Bar,” trying to revoke Passantino’s law license.
“In a 22-page complaint filed on Monday with D.C.’s Board on Professional Responsibility, prominent lawyers accused Mr. Passantino of the crimes of subornation of perjury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering and bribery,” the Times reported.
Passantino became the target of another bar complaint, this one brought in Georgia by a group called the “65 Project,” which was expressly established to intimidate attorneys into not working for Republicans. Both the State Bar of Georgia and D.C. ethics watchdogs dismissed the complaints against Passantino by the end of March.
In October, Passantino filed bar complaints of his own against Cheney and the director of the 65 Project through America First Legal.
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