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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And with respect to this, it was explicitly an off-the-records operation by Liz Cheney. I had this conversation with her staff afterwards. So you can imagine, we had in the course of... It was in February and March. We had gone through. We'd done her testimony. We'd done her depositions. She'd given the testimony. Those transcripts were out there.
And then almost two months later, I get a follow-up phone call saying...
Liz Cheney wants to do a special interview with Cassidy Hutchinson, one-on-one, in-purpose person in the Capitol building, all of which was highly unusual because every other investigation conducted by the January 6th committee was being done either by Zoom or in person with numerous representatives from the committee, their staff, members, if they wanted to attend, could attend.
This one, I was told, must be in person. It's going to be just Liz Cheney, just her staffer, just me, just Cassidy Hutchinson. And the way that they set this up, you'll remember this is in 2022, when all of the federal government was completely in lockdown because of COVID. There was no public access to the people's house. You couldn't get in.
But we were going to be afforded access for the purpose of this special interview that was going to be conducted. And it was very surreal because... As we were led into this deposition and we walk in, it was the top floor of the Cannon office building. There's a little antechamber off of one of the elevators that was completely closed to the public.
And as we were walking through there, me and Cassie Hutchinson, there were Capitol Police everywhere. I was, and I remember remarking to myself at the time, this is surreal how in a closed office building, there are all of these Capitol Police for this interview that I'm conducting with Liz Cheney. I said, she... It's really surprising she has so much protection in a closed building.
What I didn't realize is they were there for me. They were there because the expectation was that when Cassidy Hutchinson testified to the things that she had already pre-organized, she was going to testify with Liz Cheney that I might get violent. I might be the one who does something to her. You're going to get violent. That was the expectation.
I am surmising that by the fact that in a closed office building, as I walk into this interview, which was literally only me, Cassidy Hutchinson, Liz Cheney, and Dan George, her staff, and then there was a videographer and a court reporter who were there. It was just us, and there were Capitol Police everywhere.
But the thing that was really interesting and the part that I found particularly unusual is that coming out of that, it was a phenomenon in every one of our interviews that every time after Cassidy Hutchinson had testified while I was representing her, there would suddenly be leaks in real time about the fact she had testified, what a great witness she was.
And my obvious initial assumption is this committee is leaking on me immediately as soon as my client goes in. And it was my job to protect her. My job, she was somebody who had presented to me as saying, I don't want to testify. I don't like the January 6th committee. I don't want to do any of this. How do I get through this process and be able to have a job on the back end?
That was the mission as it was presented to me. I will testify if I have to, but I want to be able to get through it. But these leaks kept happening. And I kept assuming that it was the January 6th committee. So after this third interview, the one that I'm describing to you, which was, there was only four of us in the room.
Literally, as Cassidy and I are in the cab driving out together, I have on my phone a text message that had clearly come while we were testifying asking me about her testimony. And I was livid about that, that in fact, in real time, somebody's leaking to the press. So I took a screenshot of that. And I sent it to Dan George, the staffer. And I was really upset.
I sent him a text and I still have all these texts. And I said, well, that was really fast. You guys did that. And I had a subsequent conversation where I said, why are you destroying this poor girl's life by every time she testifies, you are leaking about it. And now you're leaking about this third interview. You're destroying any career opportunities she might've had.
And what Dan George told me, he says, I assure you, this was not us who leaked. Nobody on the committee knew we were doing this interview. It was only Liz Cheney and I, and that Dan George said to me, and in fact, the other committee members would probably be upset if they knew that Liz Cheney had done that.
And he told me all of that in the context of trying to assure me that they weren't the ones who had leaked in real time the fact that we had gone in. But it was extraordinarily unusual to me that there was- Who did the leaking? Yeah. Well, I can speculate as they say in the horror movies, the call might've come from inside the house. Yeah.
It might've been my client who is, and in fact, one of the things that- Oh, you think it was Cassie Hutchinson did that? I have no way of knowing, of course. But what I do know is that in real time, when all of the allegations against me broke, I was reached out to by former friends of Cassidy Hutchins saying, I can't believe what they're doing to you.
I have text messages in real time between me, the friend, and Cassidy, in which Cassidy is saying the diametrically opposite. Stefan wants me to cooperate with the committee. I don't want to cooperate with the committee. And also saying, Stefan assures me that the committee's not going to leak.
But I don't trust that I, and this is Cassidy Hutchinson texting to her friend, I'm going to run my own parallel operation. And she identifies, I'm going to have a line of communication with the New York Times and Politico. And she's already talking at the very outset of our representation that she doesn't trust that. that this will stay quiet and that she wanted to run her own investigation.
I filed a defamation lawsuit against Weissman, a MSNBC person. I included all of these... Andrew Weissman.
Who, as you can imagine, when all these stories came out, I had just unending scorn. But one of the things that Cassie Hutchinson had testified to in her deposition when she was talking about me, among all of the negative and bad things that she said about me, some of which...
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