Stefan Passantino
speaker
273 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Stefan Passantino’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah. So on the aftermath side, I'm a lawyer and I'd represented a number of witnesses who were giving testimony before the January 6th committee. Yep. Mostly uneventful things.
So I'm a political lawyer, if you can call such a thing. I'm sort of the living embodiment of a lot of the sort of dysfunction of Washington, D.C. that you need to have such a thing as a political lawyer.
of dealing with all of the sort of regulatory world of if you want to engage with politicians, if you want to give them money, if you want to lobby them, if you want to give them gifts, if you want to advocate, there's a whole myriad of regulations that surround that, which create professions for people like me to help people navigate what are the rules of the road if I want to communicate.
And that includes interfacing with government investigations, oversight hearings, all of those various activities. And so for 30 years, I've been a relatively anonymous lawyer whose job it's been to help people just follow the rules so that they can be heard. They have their opportunity to petition government. That's been my background.
I had a sort of career transforming moment where I went from running the political law compliance shop for months. one of the largest law firms in the world, a big major international law firm that had massive offices on K Street, heading up that political office to being asked by President Trump to be his deputy White House counsel.
So for the first two years of his presidency, they decided that they were going to need someone who had been around the block for a little while to help them navigate. Because remember, unlike most presidents,
incoming governments, which are staffed by people who have been in government their entire lives, and they just continue perpetuating the machine of being government people who are now working in the White House.
Except in 2016, when President Trump comes in and is not only bringing in people who really don't come from the government background, they come from successful business backgrounds and traditionally not even so much from public companies, just not used to the fact that there's myriad Washington rules that are foreign to anyone who's not been part of that world.
Correct. Without a doubt. And my job was to be the person who came in and really helped orient people to how do you navigate this bureaucracy that's called Washington, D.C.? How do you deal with all of the rules that regulate getting the job done that you were elected for? So I was The deputy White House counsel, whose job it was to make sure that people understood and followed the rules.
Now, of course, fast forwarding, it became entirely too delicious. If you have the opportunity to make ethics allegations against Trump's ethics lawyer, that's a story that's too good to check. And so I became known after having gone into that work and having worked for the president. I did that for two years. And then I moved effectively to the other side of the gates.
I helped represent the companies that were in the crosshairs. I did a lot of work for the Trump organization. And I did a lot of work for companies that wanted to interact and engage with the government. But I was no longer a government worker. I went back to being a practicing lawyer in Washington, D.C., And one of the things that that came along is the January 6th
investigation comes along, and that committee blanketed Washington, D.C. with subpoenas.
You see a lot of the very big names all having been called in to testify, but there were some 2,000 people that were called before the January 6th committee, including very low-level staffers, very low-level campaign workers, all of whom got knocks on the door from the FBI handing them subpoenas, and all of whom were saying, hey, well, since I'm here...
handing you the subpoena, you want to just talk a little bit about your role as a junior campaign person or a junior staffer or X, Y, Z within the White House. They were all getting brought in before this net.
So Liz Cheney, who was, I guess, technically the vice chair of the January 6th committee, which is, I don't think actually technically a constitutional role, but she was one of the people who was running the January 6th committee. And as they had been blanketing Washington, D.C.
with subpoenas, lots and lots of very, very young people would come back into talking to the folks which colloquially are called in Trump world, hey, I just want to talk to you. I just got contacted by the FBI. They want me to come testify. I have no idea what to do.
And so there was a process for some of the younger lawyers to say, well, let's try to find lawyers for these people who will just help them navigate this investigation getting brought before the January 1st trial.
No, no, absolutely. These are the people who happen to have been working in the Trump campaign in 2020 or had been working in the White House in 2020 or in some way had something to offer with respect to the dynamic.
Oh, yeah. Nobody who I was representing was at a protest. Everyone who I was representing were people who had either worked in the White House or had worked for the Trump campaign.
I just want to be clear on that. a narrative of what was happening inside the White House, what was happening inside the campaign from the election in 2020 through January 6 and afterwards, and to try to create a political narrative of what was happening.
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