Main: Cassidy Hutchinson, a former senior aide to Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testifies before the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection during its sixth hearing at the Cannon House Office Building on June 28, 2022, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images). Left inset: Andrew Weissmann discusses a lawsuit seeking to preserve the Kennedy Center (Andrew Weissmann/YouTube).
Andrew Weissmann, a cable news legal analyst and former top deputy to special counsel Robert Mueller during the Russia investigation, defeated a defamation lawsuit filed by a former Trump White House attorney in Washington, D.C., on Monday.
U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan rejected Stefan Passantino’s claim that Weissmann defamed him in a September 2023 post. Weissmann, a longtime federal prosecutor who later became an MS NOW legal analyst and commentator, had written that the attorney “coached” Cassidy Hutchinson, a prominent Jan. 6 witness and former aide to Mark Meadows, to “lie” to Congress—without identifying Passantino by name.
“To resolve the relevant question, the court looks to the full transcript of the September 14 deposition,” AliKhan wrote. “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.”
Passantino represented Hutchinson during three depositions before the Jan. 6 Committee. He advised her that saying “I don’t recall” was an “entirely acceptable” answer whenever she did not “100 percent recall something” with complete certainty. Hutchinson dismissed Passantino before her fourth and fifth depositions. Although she testified that he “never told me to lie,” the judge found that the deposition transcript presented a more complicated picture.
“Ms. Hutchinson’s statements indicate that Mr. Passantino repeatedly prompted Ms. Hutchinson to lie,” the judge wrote in the dismissal. The ruling cited Passantino’s instruction that “Your go-to, Cass, is ‘I don’t recall,’” including when Hutchinson asked about questions involving matters she did remember. When Hutchinson reportedly told him, “I’m f[—–]. I just lied,” Passantino allegedly replied: “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,” AliKhan 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.” The judge said Passantino encouraged Hutchinson to use the phrase whenever committee investigators could not determine whether she was being truthful, even when Hutchinson indicated that she remembered relevant information.
The judge noted that it is “perfectly possible to direct or prompt someone to lie without expressly stating as much.” She 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 wrote.
Passantino’s lawsuit accused Weissmann of publishing an “insidious lie” and a damaging “smear,” alleging that the post hurt his reputation and caused financial losses. The judge, however, found Weissmann’s statement objectively reasonable.
Law&Crime contacted one of Passantino’s attorneys for comment and asked whether the former White House lawyer plans to appeal.
Read the full ruling here.
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