Main: Cassidy Hutchinson, a top former aide to Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testifies before Jan. 6 Committee (Brandon Bell/Getty Images). Inset top: Andrew Weissman attends the National Board of Review Awards Gala in January 2023 (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP). Inset bottom: Attorney Stefan Passantino appears on LexBlog in 2015 (YouTube).
A federal judge has refused to throw out a former Trump administration White House lawyer’s defamation case against former Mueller probe prosecutor and MSNBC pundit Andrew Weissmann after closely analyzing the “coached her to lie” tweet that gave rise to the lawsuit.
Stefan Passantino sued in September 2023 claiming that Weissmann damaged the reputation Passantino spent three decades building by tweeting (without naming him) that the plaintiff “coached” Jan. 6 star witness and former Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson to “lie” to Congress.
Hunt also is Cassidy Hutchinson’s good lawyer. (Not the one who coached her to lie) And he is the guy who took notes of Trump saying, when Mueller was appointed, quoting him as saying “I’m f….d”
— Andrew Weissmann (weissmann11 on Threads)🌻 (@AWeissmann_) September 15, 2023
In his complaint, Passantino said that Weissmann’s tweet amounted to an “insidious lie” and “smear.”
U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan on Monday tossed out count two, an injurious falsehood claim, because it “falls short of the heightened standard” of showing, with specifics, how Weissmann’s tweet damaged Passantino financially. But the judge did not dismiss Passantino’s defamation claim, instead moving the case ever closer to discovery and ordering Weissmann to respond by Oct. 15.
The ruling recounts how 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.
“At her fifth deposition, Ms. Hutchinson discussed a line of questioning from her first deposition about the January 6 incident in the Presidential limousine,” AliKhan wrote. “She explained that, during a break after facing repeated questions on the topic, she had told Mr. Passantino in private, ‘I’m f*****. I just lied.’ Mr. Passantino 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 [sic] saying ‘I don’t recall’ is an entirely acceptable response to this.””
Hutchinson herself said that Passantino “never told me to lie” and that he noted “‘I don’t recall’ isn’t perjury.”
“[H]e didn’t tell me to lie. He told me not to lie,” Hutchinson said, according to the ruling.
For the judge, the dispute “boils down to a core question: was Mr. Weissmann’s social media post that ‘[Mr. Passantino] coached [a witness] to lie’ a verifiably false fact, or a subjective opinion?”
While acknowledging it wasn’t “easy” exercise, the judge agreed that the tweet was “not one of subjective opinion.”
“In that string of text, read as a whole, the clear factual implication is that Mr. Passantino ‘instruct[ed], direct[ed], or prompt[ed]’ Ms. Hutchinson ‘to lie’ to the Select Committee,” the judge wrote. “While it is true that general statements that someone is ‘spreading lies’ or ‘is a liar’ are not categorically actionable in defamation, Mr. Weissmann’s post very directly claimed that Mr. Passantino had committed a specific act— encouraging or preparing a specific witness to make false statements. A reasonable reader is likely to take away a precise message from that representation.”
AliKhan, a 2023 appointee of President Joe Biden, took over the case in December, three months after it had been assigned to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the judge in Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 case, court records show.
Law&Crime requested comment from attorneys of record for both Passantino and Weissmann.
Read the ruling here.
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