Andrew Weissmann broke his silence after a judge tossed a former Trump lawyer’s defamation suit against him over a tweet about a January 6 witness.
Weissmann, a former Mueller prosecutor, spoke Wednesday on The Bulwark’s “The Illegal News” podcast, telling host Sarah Longwell the dismissal was “a very good win.”
The case stemmed from a years-old tweet Weissmann posted about two attorneys who had represented Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Trump White House aide who became a star witness before the House Jan. 6 committee. The lawyer who sued, Stefan Passantino, served as a deputy White House counsel under Trump and represented Hutchinson before she switched attorneys.
Weissmann said Hutchinson, with her new lawyer, recounted under oath “what the instructions were that she had been given from her prior lawyer.”
His tweet claimed the attorney was “not the first lawyer who had coached her to lie,” Weissmann said.
“To be clear, I didn’t say that he had told her to lie, but coached her to do that because there’s a difference,” he told Longwell.
The lawyer then sued him in federal court. According to Weissmann, the judge tossed the case even under “the most favorable standard to the plaintiff, which is that he merely needed to show that I was negligent, not that I was intentional.”
According to Weissmann, “the court said that looking through the transcript of what Cassidy Hutchinson said, it didn’t prove what the plaintiff alleged. It proved what I said.”
He stressed that the ruling did not settle whether Hutchinson’s account was accurate.
“The court wasn’t saying Cassidy Hutchinson was telling the truth or not telling the truth,” he said. “What the court was dealing with was, was it fair for me to look at what she said and describe it in that way? And the court said, absolutely.”
The judge found “no basis to find that he was negligent, which is the lowest possible standard for defamation,” Weissmann said.
Andrew Weissmann Just Won a BIG Free-Speech Victory by The Bulwark
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