A federal judge on Monday dismissed a defamation lawsuit brought by Stefan Passantino, a former lawyer for onetime White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, against MS NOW legal analyst and law professor Andrew Weissmann.
In a 15-page order, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan granted Weissmann’s motion for judgment on the pleadings in the case Passantino brought over based on a September 2023 social media post in which the legal analyst suggested Passantino “coached [Hutchinson] to lie” during her closed-door depositions before the House Jan. 6 committee.
AliKhan ruled that Passantino failed to show that Weissmann was negligent because Hutchinson’s testimony gave Weissmann reasonable grounds to say Passantino had “coached” her to lie.
The ruling effectively ends the lawsuit in federal district court.
Weissmann and a spokesperson for Passantino did not immediately respond to requests for comment from MS NOW on Monday.
Passantino, who served as a senior lawyer in the first Trump administration, represented Hutchinson during her first three closed-door interviews with the Jan. 6 committee. Hutchinson later changed attorneys and provided additional testimony to investigators about her interactions with Passantino. She became well-known after her testimony at a televised Jan. 6 committee hearing in June 2022.
Hutchinson told the committee that Passantino had never explicitly instructed her to lie and had told her not to lie. But she also testified that he advised her that saying she did not recall certain events was an acceptable response and that “the less you remember, the better.”
The Jan. 6 committee later said it had obtained evidence that a lawyer advised a witness she could claim not to remember facts she actually recalled. Multiple news organizations subsequently identified Passantino as that lawyer.
Weissmann, a former prosecutor on special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, wrote on X in September 2023 that another lawyer was Hutchinson’s “good lawyer,” adding in parentheses: “Not the one who coached her to lie.” Passantino sued days later, alleging Weissmann’s post “deeply damaged his 30-year reputation and caused him to lose significant business and income.”
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