A federal judge has thrown out a defamation lawsuit filed by former Trump White House attorney Stefan Passantino against Andrew Weissmann, the ex-federal prosecutor and MS NOW legal analyst who accused Passantino of coaching a witness to lie to Congress during the Jan. 6 investigation.
U.S. District Judge Loren L. Alikhan issued a 15-page ruling Monday dismissing the case, finding that Passantino could not clear the legal bar required to prove his claim against Weissmann.
The legal battle traces back to a September 2023 post on X, in which Weissmann, who previously served on Robert Mueller’s team investigating Russian election interference, alleged that former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson had been coached to lie by Passantino, who was her attorney at the time.
Passantino fired back with a lawsuit accusing Weissmann of defamation and injurious falsehood, claiming the social media post had inflicted serious harm on a professional reputation he had spent three decades building, along with costing him business opportunities.
Central to Passantino’s case was a portion of congressional transcripts in which Hutchinson directly stated, “Stefan never told me to lie.” But Judge Alikhan’s opinion pointed to other details from the record that complicated that defense.
According to the ruling, Passantino met with Hutchinson for roughly two hours ahead of her fifth deposition, during which he laid out a strategy to “downplay” her role in events and advised that “the less you remember, the better.” He reportedly coached her that if she couldn’t recall every detail of a matter, she should simply respond that she did not remember.
The opinion recounts Hutchinson asking Passantino, “If I do recall something but not every little detail, can I still say I don’t recall?” Passantino allegedly told her yes, encouraging her to fall back on the phrase “I don’t recall” as her standard answer.
That guidance reportedly extended to a particularly explosive claim Hutchinson had made previously: that former President Trump had demanded to be driven to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to join his supporters, and had even grabbed for the steering wheel of his vehicle in anger.
Per the court filing, Hutchinson expressed distress in the moment, saying, “I’m fucked. I just lied.” Passantino allegedly reassured her, responding, “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.” He reportedly added, “You’re doing exactly what you should be doing.”
Despite that exchange, Judge Alikhan stopped short of declaring outright that Passantino had coached Hutchinson to lie under oath. Still, she determined that Passantino’s defamation claim failed to satisfy a core legal requirement: proving that Weissmann’s statement was actually false.
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