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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I think were just not true, but largely a lot of which, and it sounds a little weird coming from me, can be explained as a somewhat impressionable person coming in thinking she's going into an adversarial relationship. But one of the things that came out of that was Cassidy was very, very clear. Stefan never told me to lie. Never told me to lie.
And that when Andrew Weissman and others literally tweeted, well, her new lawyers are the good lawyers, unlike the lawyer that told her to lie. Well, I just had had enough at that point. It's like, I'm just not going to be a victim anymore. We have defamation laws for a purpose. I'm going to avail myself of them.
And in that complaint, the text messages that I've just described to you, I've screenshotted and they're in the complaint. But it was somewhat clear to me from text messages that I've seen that, that there appears to have been from the very outset a messaging operation that was being run by my own client, completely unbeknownst to me.
Now, I'm basing that on just text messages that I've seen and basing it on the fact that Liz Cheney's staffers assured me nobody else knew that this was happening and they would never leak it because they wouldn't have wanted their own committee to know. And it's ironic. I'm a little almost embarrassed about it now, but in the context of that conversation that I had with Dan George,
I had this, I was sort of, I was still at that point sort of a naive institutionalist Washington lawyer. I had grown up in Washington my whole life. I'd been around that. I had incredible respect for the institutions of Washington, for Congress, for the media, for when Walter Cronkite said something, it was a fact. Incredible respect for the agencies, the State Department, the intelligence.
And so I was still somewhat in that world where I had this respect. And as I'm having this conversation with Dan George, the staffer, I'm saying, I cannot believe you guys were leaking information literally while we're in there, and he was assuring me he hadn't, I had a conversation with Dan George.
I said, Dan George, Dan, you and I are going to work in this town far too long to be playing games with any leaking to the press. And I said, I assure you, I've practiced law for 30 years. This is not how I do business. And I have too much respect for the Congress. And I said, and I have too much respect for Liz Cheney to ever leak.
And I asked him at the time, I said, I want you to please go and tell Liz Cheney how much respect I have for her, and that I would never leak something that came out of the committee. Now, Dan George tells me he had that conversation with Cheney.
I don't know if they actually did, but all of these are reasons why, to me, I was confronted with a highly, highly unusual scenario whereby there was this small operation that was done, this small interview, Lots of security, but I didn't think anything of it. At the time, it was unusual, but it moved on.
It was only later, after I had been fired as Cassidy's lawyer and after she had testified live on TV, that she subsequently provided lots of testimony describing in detail the nature of our interaction together. And it was in that September interview transcript that I learned all of these back-channel things.
I learned the degree to which there had been communications that had been going on, how they had set up this interview, how they had expected me to block her from testifying, how they had sort of laughed about how... How surprised I was that a lot of these new facts were coming out.
And she literally testifies in that interview that as we're walking out of the Cannon office building, the two of us, we've completed this interview. I didn't obstruct her. The transcripts are there. I never blocked her from testifying. I never... Told her I never created objections to coach her. I didn't do any of those things.
But she literally describes in her testimony, as we're walking out the door, she turns around to Dan George, literally behind my back, saying something to the effect of mouthing, I'm so screwed. And the Dan George mouths back to her, I'm sorry. Now, when I'm reading this in the transcript, and it's all there for anyone who wants to read it, I realize... This whole thing had been a setup.
And if it was simply a question of, well, we just want to get the truth from Cassidy, well, then just fire me, get a new lawyer, let her testify. No, this was very important that I be sitting next to her while she provided this new inflammatory testimony with the eye towards having me obstruct her in some way. Why were they so intent on hurting you? You're just a lawyer. Well...
I'm speculating on that, but one could infer that you need to have a reason why testimony changed. Why was it that somebody who provided testimony one way asked open-ended questions where the lawyer didn't obstruct, didn't block the person?
In fact, in the first two interviews, the only objections I ever raised was when Dan George was asking really incoherent questions and I would say, do you mean this? And he would literally thank me, it's all on the record, you don't have to believe me, Those are the only times I interrupted.
But now you have to say, well, now the person who was asked, hey, what happened on the Ellipse and tells one story now wants to tell a very diametrically different story about strangling the president, strangling Secret Service or lots of things.
These all came out as new evidence.
That testimony came for the first time, I believe, in her live testimony. That was the sort of very dramatic testimony where she says, you know, they grabbed the clavicle and all of those... That testimony came out live. The two things that... Had she ever told you that before? No. And I want to be fair...
to Cassidy, which might seem odd that I'm saying that, but I wanna be fair to her because she testifies that in our first meetings, she started to describe to me this traumatic thing that she had heard second or third hand about some incident that had happened in the drive back from the Ellipse and how I had been cutting her off.
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