Main: Cassidy Hutchinson, a top former aide to Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testifies during the sixth hearing by the House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 insurrection in the Cannon House Office Building on June 28, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images). Left inset: Andrew Weissmann pictured discussing a lawsuit to save Kennedy Center (Andrew Weissmann/YouTube).
A cable news pundit who served as special counsel Robert Mueller’s top lieutenant during the Russia probe defeated a former Trump White House lawyer’s defamation claim in Washington, D.C., on Monday.
Andrew Weissmann, a longtime federal prosecutor turned MS NOW legal analyst and commentator, did not negligently tweet about Stefan Passantino without naming him in September 2023 when he said the 30-year attorney “coached” Jan. 6 star witness and former Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson to “lie” to Congress in her testimony.
“To resolve the relevant question, the court looks to the full transcript of the September 14 deposition. The court concludes that Mr. Passantino’s claims about the message of the transcript are not only legally conclusory, but also incorrect. The transcript, far from contradicting Mr. Weissmann’s statement, supports it,” wrote U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan.
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Passantino represented Hutchinson for three Jan. 6 Committee depositions, advising her that “I don’t recall” was an “entirely acceptable” response if she didn’t “100 percent recall something” down to the last detail. Before Hutchinson’s fourth and fifth depositions, however, she fired Passantino. And though she herself said that Passantino “never told me to lie,” the judge saw something else in the transcript.
“Ms. Hutchinson’s statements indicate that Mr. Passantino repeatedly prompted Ms. Hutchinson to lie. For example, Mr. Passantino’s advice included telling Ms. Hutchinson that ‘Your go-to, Cass, is ‘I don’t recall,’ even when she asked about answering ‘certain questions that [she] would recall,'” the dismissal said. “When Ms. Hutchinson told Mr. Passantino, ‘I’m f[—–]. I just lied,’ Mr. Passantino purportedly responded, ‘You didn’t lie … They don’t know what you know, Cassidy. They don’t know that you can recall some of these things. So you saying ‘I don’t recall’ is an entirely acceptable response to this.”
“In other words,” the Joe Biden-appointed jurist continued, “the transcript reflects that even as Mr. Passantino nominally instructed Ms. Hutchinson not to lie, he repeatedly urged her to say ‘I don’t recall’ based on the unverifiability of that response—not based on its truth. He encouraged her to say ‘I don’t recall’ whenever the Committee would not know the difference, even when Ms. Hutchinson indicated to him that she did in fact recall relevant information.”
Noting it is “perfectly possible to direct or prompt someone to lie without expressly stating as much,” the judge added that “a reasonable person attempting to verify Mr. Weissmann’s statements would have found ample sources of support” in the public record.
“[L]arge swaths of people, including reporters held to a higher standard of care, drew the same conclusions from the same testimony,” AliKhan said.
Passantino’s complaint had alleged that Weissmann’s post amounted to an “insidious lie” and “smear” that damaged his reputation and harmed him financially, but on Monday the judge instead credited the “objective reasonableness of Mr. Weissmann’s statement[.]”
Law&Crime sought comment from one of Passantino’s lawyers and asked whether an appeal will follow.
Read the ruling in full here.
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