By Derek Vanbuskirk
A U.S. District Court has dismissed a defamation lawsuit against attorney Andrew Weissmann, who was sued for claiming that former Trump White House lawyer Stefan Passantino coached a witness to lie to Congress during the investigation of the 2021 Capitol riot.
In the 15-page opinion issued Monday, federal Judge Loren L. Alikhan dismissed the lawsuit, concluding that Passantino had failed to prove his case against Weissmann. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Dem Candidate May Have Violated FEC Law By Hiring Foreign National)
The lawsuit stemmed from a Sept. 2023 post on X in which former federal prosecutor and MS NOW legal analyst Weissmann said that former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson had been coached to lie by Passantino, her former attorney.
Passantino subsequently sued for defamation and injurious falsehood, alleging that the post had severely damaged his 30-year professional reputation and cost him business.
In his complaint, Passantino quoted congressional transcripts in which Hutchinson explicitly stated that “Stefan never told me to lie.”
Alikhan, however, noted in her opinion that Hutchinson and Passantino had met for a couple of hours before the fifth deposition, during which he said the strategy was that they were “going to downplay your role” and that “the less you remember, the better.”
He also told her that if she couldn’t remember every specific detail of an answer to a question asked of her, she should just answer that she does not recall.
“If I do recall something but not every little detail,” Hutchinson said, according to the opinion, “can I still say I don’t recall?”
“Yes,” Passantino replied, telling Hutchinson to use “I don’t recall” as a go-to response.
Hutchinson had been instructed not to recall specifics regarding previous claims she had made about an alleged heated incident with Trump inside his presidential vehicle. She had claimed that Trump demanded to be driven to the Capitol to join his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, and even grabbed the wheel of the car to steer it toward the protest.
“I’m fucked. I just lied,” Hutchinson said, according to the opinion.
“You didn’t lie…,” Passantino replied. “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.”
“You’re doing exactly what you should be doing,” he added.
While Alikhan did not explicitly state that Passantino had coached Hutchinson into lying during sworn testimony, she ruled that Passantino’s claim did not meet the legal standard of defamation, one element of which is proving that the statement in question was false.
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