Passantino Defamation Suit Against Weissmann Dismissed on Negligence

A federal judge in Washington ended Stefan Passantino's defamation suit against Andrew Weissmann on September 21, 2026, holding that Passantino pleaded no facts showing Weissmann was even negligent about the truth of his post. The court never reached whether the statement was true.

Information last verified on September 26, 2026. This is a developing story; we update it as the record changes.

Status: Decided. Judge Loren L. AliKhan granted judgment on the pleadings for the defendant in Passantino v. Weissmann, No. 23-cv-2780 (LLA) (D.D.C.), in a memorandum opinion filed September 21, 2026. The contemporaneous order, ECF No. 54, states that it "constitutes a final judgment of the court within the meaning of Rule 58(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure" and directs the Clerk of Court to terminate the case. Under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(a)(1)(A) a notice of appeal is due within 30 days after entry of the judgment, subject to the post-judgment motions that can reset that clock. As of September 26, 2026 the docket showed no notice of appeal.

Jurisdiction scope: This is a federal trial court decision applying District of Columbia defamation law in diversity. It is not binding precedent on any other court. It does not address defamation law in any state, and the fault standards it applies are D.C. standards, which differ in their details from those of other jurisdictions.

What Happened

Stefan Passantino has practised law for more than thirty years and served as a senior lawyer in the Trump administration in 2017 and 2018. According to the allegations the court assumed true, he represented Cassidy Hutchinson at her first three closed-door depositions before the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, on February 23, March 7 and May 17, 2022. In early June 2022, after the third deposition, Hutchinson dismissed him and retained new counsel. She then gave a fourth, televised deposition on June 28, 2022, wrote to the Select Committee saying she intended to waive her attorney-client privilege with Passantino, and sat for a fifth, closed-door deposition on September 14, 2022. It is that fifth deposition whose veracity Passantino disputes.

In September 2023 Andrew Weissmann published a social media post describing Passantino as a lawyer who "coached [a witness appearing before Congress] to lie." Passantino sued that month, pleading defamation as Count I and injurious falsehood as Count II. Weissmann moved to dismiss; the court granted that motion in part and denied it in part in September 2024, rejecting Weissmann's argument that the post was non-actionable subjective opinion while noting he remained free to attack the first element on other grounds, including substantial truth. The same ruling dismissed Count II, the injurious falsehood claim, so only the defamation count went forward.

The case then went to an answer, a referral to a magistrate judge, an unsuccessful settlement conference in May 2025, and discovery. In January 2026 Weissmann moved for judgment on the pleadings under Rule 12(c). Passantino separately asked for a videoconference to resolve discovery disputes, which the court held in abeyance.

On September 21, 2026 Judge AliKhan granted Weissmann's motion and denied Passantino's as moot.

The Two Questions the Court Did Not Answer

The most useful thing about this opinion is what it declined to decide, because both of the questions it skipped are the ones that usually dominate a case like this.

It did not decide whether the statement was true. A D.C. defamation plaintiff must prove four elements, which the court took from Solers, Inc. v. Doe, 977 A.2d 941, 948 (D.C. 2009): a false and defamatory statement concerning the plaintiff; publication without privilege to a third party; fault amounting to at least negligence; and either actionability irrespective of special harm or special harm caused by the publication. Weissmann contested the first element, arguing substantial truth, and the third, arguing no fault. The court took the fault route and wrote that it would "grant judgment for Mr. Weissmann without reaching the question of substantial truth."

It did not decide whether Passantino is a public figure. That question governs which fault standard applies. As the court put it, quoting Salem Media Group, Inc. v. Awan, 301 A.3d 633, 645-46 (D.C. 2023): "If the plaintiff [in a defamation suit] is a private figure, then negligence is the applicable fault standard." A public figure must instead show actual malice, meaning the statement was made "with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not," the standard from New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 280 (1964).

Weissmann argued primarily that Passantino failed to plead negligence, and argued in the alternative that Passantino is a limited-purpose public figure who failed to plead actual malice. The court chose the path that made the public-figure fight unnecessary:

"Because the court concludes that Mr. Passantino fails to plead facts sufficient to establish negligence, the court assumes without deciding that Mr. Passantino is a private figure."

That is a deliberate structural choice. Negligence is the easier standard for a plaintiff to satisfy. A plaintiff who cannot clear the lower bar cannot clear the higher one, so resolving the case on negligence disposes of it whichever category the plaintiff falls into. Our explainer on when a public figure can sue for defamation sets out the categories the court left untouched here.

What Negligence Means in a Defamation Case

The standard the court applied is narrow and specific, and it is easy to misstate.

Negligence in this context is not carelessness in general. It is a failure, quoting Kendrick v. Fox Television, 659 A.2d 814, 822 (D.C. 1995), "to observe an ordinary degree of care in ascertaining the truth of an assertion before publishing it to others." The question is about the pre-publication check, not about whether the statement turned out to be right.

Applied here, the court's reasoning ran through the source material Weissmann was working from. The court took judicial notice of the full public transcripts of Hutchinson's testimony, recounting them "not for its truth, but for its existence as a public record of which the parties agree Mr. Weissmann had notice." Passantino's own complaint had invoked those transcripts, alleging that Weissmann was negligent in light of them.

The court assumed as true Passantino's allegation that he "had done nothing to obstruct or shape Ms. Hutchinson's testimony." That assumption did not save the claim. As the opinion explains, Passantino's quotations from the transcript were "insufficient to establish that Mr. Weissmann should have known Mr. Passantino's pleaded truth ... was the actual truth," and his broader characterisations of what the transcript implied were "legally conclusory and belied by the transcript as a whole."

The court went further than it strictly needed to. Turning to the September 14 transcript, it wrote:

"The court concludes that Mr. Passantino's claims about the message of the transcript are not only legally conclusory, but also incorrect. The transcript, far from contradicting Mr. Weissman's statement, supports it. Ms. Hutchinson's statements indicate that Mr. Passantino repeatedly prompted Ms. Hutchinson to lie."

That passage sits inside the negligence analysis, which asks whether Weissmann took ordinary care before publishing, not whether his accusation was true. The court had already said it would not reach substantial truth. But readers should have the sentence, because it is considerably more pointed than the surrounding language.

The court then added an objective cross-check. At a Select Committee business meeting on December 19, 2022, Representative Zoe Lofgren stated that "one lawyer told a witness the witness could in certain circumstances tell the Committee that she didn't recall facts when she actually did recall them," and numerous mainstream outlets promptly identified Passantino as that lawyer. Passantino argued there was no record evidence Weissmann had seen those articles. The court treated that as beside the point:

"Representative Lofgren's statement and the public reporting on it reflect and support the objective reasonableness of Mr. Weissman's statement because large swaths of people, including reporters held to a higher standard of care, drew the same conclusions from the same testimony."

For the standard of care the court cited Battle v. Thompson, 646 A.2d 315, 319 (D.C. 1994), for the proposition that "[a] uniform standard of care applies in actions for negligence: reasonable care under the circumstances," alongside comment g to Section 580B of the Restatement (Second) of Torts, which distinguishes a professional disseminator of news, held to professional skill, from an ordinary citizen, for whom "customs of the community as a whole may be relevant."

Passantino also cited articles showing that many had questioned Hutchinson's credibility. The court held those "at most demonstrate that reasonable minds could have differing views on the matter," and that Passantino had not alleged a reasonably prudent person should have sought them out. Its conclusion:

"The court accordingly concludes that Mr. Passantino fails to plead any facts that could support a claim that Mr. Weissmann was negligent for purposes of his defamation claim."

Why the Case Ended on the Pleadings After Discovery

One procedural feature is worth drawing out, because it is unusual enough to confuse a reader.

Rule 12(c) allows judgment on the pleadings after the pleadings are closed. The court described such a motion, quoting D.D.C. precedent, as "designed to dispose of cases where the material facts are not in dispute and a judgment on the merits can be rendered by looking at the substance of the pleadings and any judicially noted facts." The movant "shoulders a heavy burden of justification," per District No. 1, Pacific Coast District, Marine Engineers' Beneficial Association, AFL-CIO v. Liberty Maritime Corp., 933 F.3d 751, 760 (D.C. Cir. 2019).

The court accepts the non-movant's well-pleaded factual allegations as true, but not "insofar as they contradict ... matters subject to judicial notice," citing Kaempe v. Myers, 367 F.3d 958, 963 (D.C. Cir. 2004), and not the non-movant's legal conclusions.

That combination is what decided this case. The transcripts were judicially noticeable public records the complaint itself relied on. Once the court could read them, the pleading's characterisation of what they showed could not survive contact with the documents, and no amount of discovery would change what the transcripts say.

Analysis: Why This Matters

The following is analysis from the Recording Law Editorial Team.

The instinct with a ruling like this is to read it as a verdict on the underlying dispute. It is not, though the opinion is less neutral in its reasoning than its formal holding is. The court declined to decide whether Weissmann's post was substantially true, and it entered judgment on fault alone. So the decision adjudicates no one's truthfulness. At the same time, it did not stop at saying a reasonable reader could have read the transcript as Weissmann did: it said the transcript supports his statement and that Hutchinson's account indicates Passantino repeatedly prompted her to lie. A reader deserves both halves of that, and a summary that reports only the holding would be leaving out the more damaging half.

What the opinion does illustrate is how much work the fault element does in modern defamation practice, and how the negligence standard behaves when the statement rests on a public record.

The usual framing of defamation law puts the weight on the public figure question, because the gap between negligence and actual malice is understood to be where cases are won and lost. This decision is a reminder that the negligence standard is not a formality. A private-figure plaintiff must still plead facts showing the speaker failed to take ordinary care to check before publishing. Where the speaker was reading a public transcript that many other readers, including professional reporters, read the same way, pleading that failure is hard. The reference to reporters "held to a higher standard of care" reaching the same conclusion is doing real work: it converts a contested interpretation into evidence that the interpretation was at least a reasonable one to reach.

There is a limiting principle worth noting, and the court supplies it rather than us. The Restatement comment the court cites draws a line between professional news disseminators and ordinary citizens. Weissmann is a commentator working from a public congressional record, which is close to the most favourable possible posture for this argument. A speaker repeating a rumour with no documentary basis would be in a different position under the same standard, and the opinion offers no comfort there.

The procedural posture also deserves attention. This case was dismissed in part in 2024, answered, mediated, and discovered into, and then ended on the pleadings in 2026 anyway. That sequence is a reasonable argument that the fault question could have been resolved earlier, and it is the kind of cost that early-dismissal mechanisms exist to prevent. The opinion does not discuss any such mechanism, so neither will we.

We are not predicting whether an appeal will be taken or how it would come out.

How This Affects You

These are general observations, not advice about any particular case.

A defamation claim needs more than a false statement. Under D.C. law it needs a false and defamatory statement, publication without privilege, fault of at least negligence, and either per se actionability or special harm. A claim can fail on fault while the truth of the statement remains undetermined.

Where a statement interprets a public document, the document tends to govern. A court can take judicial notice of public records, and it does not have to accept a complaint's characterisation of a record that the record itself contradicts.

The private-figure and public-figure labels matter less than they are often assumed to when a plaintiff cannot clear the negligence bar, because a plaintiff who fails the lower standard necessarily fails the higher one. Readers working through the elements can start with our overview of what defamation of character requires, the state-by-state differences in defamation rules, and, for suits brought in the District, our guide to District of Columbia defamation law.

This is general legal information, not legal advice. It covers a single federal trial court decision applying District of Columbia defamation law, read from the memorandum opinion and verified on September 26, 2026. The decision may be appealed and the analysis here does not address any other jurisdiction's defamation standards. Consult a lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction about your own situation.

Related articles

• District of Columbia defamation law
• When a public figure can sue for defamation
• Defamation of character: elements and examples
• Defamation laws by state

---

Last updated: 2026-09-26. This is a developing story; details verified as of 2026-09-26.