Defamation Case Blows Up In Trump Lawyer’s Face
One problem with suing for defamation is what happens if you lose because the court concludes the alleged defamatory statements were true. That would be particularly bad if the person suing is an attorney attempting to claim that someone saying he suborned perjury from his client was the defamation. It would be even worse if he was the ethics attorney for Donald Trump.
That happened today to Stefan Passantino, Donald Trump’s former White House ethics attorney and later directly representing Trump against Congressional investigations of his business interests. This story involves his also representing (in an obvious potential conflict of interest) Cassidy Hutchinson when she testified to the January 6 Committee. For a more detailed account of that story consider reading my article, “The Corruption & Redemption Of Cassidy Hutchinson,” from December 2022.
In summary, Hutchinson, a former Trump aide, provided bombshell testimony about an alleged incident where Trump supposedly grabbed the steering wheel of his car and ordered magnetometers removed from his J6 event allowing people in with weapons.
Hutchinson also eventually testified that Passantino, as her supposed attorney (provided by the Trump Organization) coached her to lie to the committee. In particular, he coached her to claim she did not know the answer to questions even if she did know (for more detail read my above linked article).
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In September 2023 Journalist Andrew Weissmann posted on Twitter saying that Hutchinson had a good lawyer now, not “one who coached her to lie.”
Passantino sued Weissmann for defamation claiming Weissmann’s suggestion that he coached Hutchinson to lie was defamatory.
Today the United States District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the case essentially because what Weissmann said was true. Reviewing the transcript of Hutchinson’s testimony the court stated:
“The transcript, far from contradicting Mr. Weissman’s statement, supports it. Ms. Hutchinson’s statements indicate that Mr. Passantino repeatedly prompted Ms. Hutchinson to lie . . . 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.”
As I put it almost four years ago: “This is not coaching a witness to tell the truth. This is coaching the witness to lie in a way that can’t be caught.” Today, a judge agreed.
You can read the full text of the judge’s decision HERE.
