From Judge Loren L. AliKhan's decision yesterday in Passantino v. Weissmann (D.D.C.):
The following factual allegations drawn from Mr. Passantino's complaint, are accepted as true for the purpose of evaluating the motion before the court. Mr. Passantino has been a lawyer for more than thirty years. In 2017 and 2018, he served as a senior lawyer in the Trump administration. Since then, he has been in private practice.
Following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the House of Representatives established a Select Committee to investigate what had happened. As part of its investigation, the Select Committee interviewed numerous witnesses, including Cassidy Hutchinson, a former special assistant to President Trump who had been serving under the direction of White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on January 6, 2021.
Mr. Passantino represented Ms. Hutchinson at her first three closed-door Select Committee depositions on February 23, March 7, and May 17, 2022. While the complaint does not specify exactly when this occurred, Ms. Hutchinson sent text messages to a friend expressing that she "d[idn]'t want to comply" with the Committee's requests. In the same conversation, however, she noted that "Stefan [Passantino] want[ed] [her] to comply."
Following the second deposition, Ms. Hutchinson felt that she had "withheld things" from the Select Committee and wanted to "go in and … elaborate … and kind of expand" on some topics. Unbeknownst to Mr. Passantino, Ms. Hutchinson asked a friend to "back channel to the committee and say that there [were] a few things that [she] want[ed] to talk about." While Ms. Hutchinson deliberately kept this from Mr. Passantino, she explained at a future deposition that, at that time, she "wasn't at a place where [she] wanted to terminate [her] attorney-client relationship with [Mr. Passantino]."
