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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Appearances
Correct. Well, it's one of the lawyer's greatest sort of Matlock cross-examination that everyone dreams of is, were you lying then or were you lying now? I've been there in depositions.
Correct.
So this is Cassidy Hutchinson that we were talking about who famously testified live before the committee. and that it became extraordinarily well known that she was an extremely powerful witness when she testified live before the committee.
And as one of the elements of providing that testimony, there was significant discussion of the fact that she had previously had this Trump lawyer who had effectively coached her not to tell the truth, had coached her to say, I don't recall when in fact she did recall. All of those things were being accused of me as the lawyer.
So Cassidy Hutchinson, I don't know that we actually overlapped in the White House together. And if we did, I didn't know her. But she came in as, I believe, started as an intern. I think she was 25 years old at the time. And ultimately rose to a very...
prominent position with Mark Meadows in the chief of staff office in that she had proximity and access to a great deal that was happening in the White House. And so she was one of these myriad of witnesses, not to my mind, unlike a number of the other witnesses who I had been bringing before the committee, who might've observed things and might've seen things, had provided her testimony.
I thought it was over. It only happened subsequently that I learned that while I was representing her, Liz Cheney was communicating with her behind my back while I was her lawyer. Now, that's a Lawyer 101 thing that you're just not allowed to do. One of the things that's set up within our legal rules of ethics in order to prevent
an unscrupulous lawyer from manipulating the client is there is a very clear bar rule that says if somebody is represented by a lawyer with respect to a particular matter, you, the lawyer on the other side, don't have the right to communicate directly to that client except through the lawyer. And that rule is in place to prevent people from circumventing the lawyer and manipulating the testimony.
No, this is a longstanding. This is one of those 101 rules of law.
Clearly a core rule. And it's also a core rule that you can't do knowingly indirectly, which you can't do directly. You can't, and this happened here from all the things that I've seen. Like I said, you don't have to believe a word I'm saying. It's right in the testimony that her staffers, which were lawyers, were also communicating, and she was working through what I would call a cutout,
which was Alyssa Farrah Griffin, was effectively operating as Cassidy's friend who started the process as a go-between.
She is a prominent TV personality and also famously not just on The View, but also was a, I think, a contributor for CNN, which a lot of folks... And I just feel duty-bound to report that she's...
Correct. And what that resulted in, and we've now learned through some fantastic work that has been done by the House, Chairman Loudermilk of the House Admin Oversight Committee,
Uncovered documents that I just would not have believed still existed or would have been turned over to the government, which effectively prove that there was this back channel of conversation between Liz Cheney and her staff, both of whom are lawyers and others, effectively to say, We have more we want to say.
We have more testimony that Cassidy Hutchinson wants to provide, whether that's because she chose to provide different testimony or because she felt, gee, I just wasn't asked the right questions. Whatever the reason was, there was this backline communication that was created, completely unbeknownst to me, that there was going to be an opportunity for another testimony
investigation of Cassidy Hutchinson, but most importantly to me, it was a parallel element of, well, not only, hey, I want to change my story and I want to say a lot of really inflammatory things about Donald Trump that I didn't testify to under the previous times when I was before you, but also...
we're not going to tell my lawyer, this Trump lawyer, that we're having this conversation and we are going to bombard both of you with questions that they had already communicated what those questions were going to be with an effort to try to get me to obstruct Congress in the face of this deposition.
It was effectively a law enforcement sting operation to get me to effectively block her, drag her out of there, silence her, stop her from testifying in this third interview.
Correct. And the idea was that they were going to not only get these very inflammatory facts, new facts out of Cassidy Hutchinson, but in the process of doing that, were setting up a third interview that I was going to be in attendance at, and at which time Liz Cheney was going to ask Cassidy Hutchinson certain questions that Cassidy had already fed her, saying, these are things I want to say.
And she talks about in her testimony that they knew that I was going to be extremely upset that these questions were being asked. And the expectation was that I was going to obstruct her, that I was going to drag her out. I was going to do something. And they did this on purpose? Clearly on purpose. They testified to it.
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