Stefan Passantino | |
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Born | Washington, DC, U.S. | August 12, 1966
Education | Drew University (BA) Emory University (JD) |
Stefan Passantino (born August 12, 1966) is an American lawyer and former ethics attorney who worked in President Trump's Office of White House Counsel. [1] He is best known for his representation of a witness in the Jan 6 Capitol attack House investigation. In January 2023 he was hired by the Trump Organization.
Passantino graduated from Drew University in 1988, and Emory University School of Law in 1991. [2] [3] Passantino was Managing Editor of the Emory Law Journal. [4] He then clerked for U.S. District Judge Herbert Murray. [3]
He was head of McKenna Long & Aldridge’s political law team [5] until it merged with Dentons in 2015, where Passantino was the head of the political division; he advised clients on issues including campaign contribution rules and disclosure guidelines. Chambers USA 2010 called him one of the leading political lawyers in U.S. [5] He is a co-author of Handbook on Corporate Political Activity, [6] a "regular contributor" for media outlets including CNN, Fox News, and Politico, and a visiting professor at the University of Georgia. [7]
Passantino joined the Trump administration in January 2017, serving as deputy counsel to the president, working on compliance and ethics, policing conflicts of interest, and approving and enforcing ethics requirements. [8] [9] His nomination had the strong support of Howard Dean, former Democratic presidential candidate, who opined that Passantino would be clear about ethical boundaries. Newt Gingrich also backed him, stating he would “stand firm for an administration that is above reproach.” [3] The major conflict of interest case that came up during his tenure was Kellyanne Conway's endorsement of Ivanka Trump's clothing line. Passantino ruled that this was an inadvertent error, and there was no disciplinary action. [10]
He left the administration in August 2018, [11] joining Milwaukee-based law firm Michael Best, where Passantino was a partner and led the firm's political law group. [12] [1] On December 21, 2022, he took a leave of absence from the firm. [13]
On December 28, 2022, Michael Best said in a statement that the firm separated their relationship with Passantino. [14]
In January 2023 the Trump Organization has hired him to assist with congressional inquiries into Donald Trump's business interests. [15]
Passantino was the lawyer for Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who was unemployed at the time, who under subpoena testified before the United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. [16] [17] Trump's Save America political action committee paid Passantino for his representation of Hutchinson, and the committee reported that he did not tell her who was paying him. [18] After she was deposed, Hutchinson received a call from a top aide to Mark Meadows saying: "Mark wants me to let you know that he knows you’re loyal, and he knows you’ll do the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and the boss." [19] Concerned that her testimony was being conveyed to Trump, and suspecting Passantino's legal team of leaking it to him, she terminated Passantino's representation of her. [19] [20]
Hutchinson testified that White House officials anticipated violence days in advance of January 6, that Trump knew supporters at the Ellipse rally were armed with weapons including AR-15s, yet asked to relax security checks at his speech, and that Trump planned to join the crowd at the Capitol and became irate when the Secret Service refused his request. [21] [22] She said that she was encouraged to claim "I do not recall" for events she remembered which might make the president look bad. Hutchinson's testified that Passantino assured her that "Trump world" would find her a job and keep her in the family. [23] On December 20, 2022, CNN identified Passantino as the lawyer who urged a key witness to mislead the committee. [18] On December 22, 2022, the committee released the transcript of Hutchinson's interview, describing her interactions with Passantino. [24] [25] Days before her testimony, she dismissed Passantino, [26] replacing him with attorney Jody Hunt. [27] Passantino denied urging her to mislead the panel. [1] [28]
The committee has urged the DOJ to examine the facts of this case to see whether prosecution is warranted. [29] In March 2023, several dozen prominent legal figures filed a complaint seeking to have Passantino's law license revoked on allegations of subornation of perjury, obstruction of justice, witness tampering, and bribery. [30]
In December, 2023, Passantino accused the House January 6 committee of spreading false information about his representation of Hutchinson and is seeking $67 million in damages. He filed a Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) lawsuit on Dec. 20 in the Northern District of Georgia. [31]
In March 2023, ethics panels in Georgia and Washington, DC dismissed the ethics complaints against Passantino. [32]
Passantino was "national counsel" on Newt Gingrich's 2012 presidential campaign and for former House Speaker Dennis Hastert. [33] He also served as Johnny Isakson and Roy Blunt's chief election counsel. [34]
In 2019 he founded Elections LLC to advise President Trump's 2020 campaign and other Republican candidates. Elections LLC received about $2 million (~$2.32 million in 2023) from Trump associated PACs. [1] In October 2020, just before the last debate, Passantino met with a Wall Street Journal reporter, reportedly providing information linking Hunter Biden business dealings in China to his father. After due diligence, the story was limited to a stub and noted that there was no proof of the central claim that Joe Biden had profited from his son's dealings. [35]
In 2020 he co-chaired Lawyers for Trump, a national organization of lawyers formed to mobilize support for Trump's reelection campaign. [36] After the 2020 presidential election Passantino sued in court to overturn the results in Georgia, [37] [38] On November 22, 2022, a federal subpoena was served on election officials in several states seeking their records for all communications with Passantino. [39]
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After Democratic nominee Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election, Republican nominee and then-incumbent president Donald Trump pursued an unprecedented effort to overturn the election, with support and assistance from his campaign, proxies, political allies, and many of his supporters. These efforts culminated in the January 6 United States Capitol attack by Trump supporters, which was widely described as an attempted coup d'état. One week later, Trump was impeached for incitement of insurrection but was acquitted by the Senate by a vote of 57–43, 10 votes short of the 67 votes required to convict him.
The following article is a broad timeline of the course of events surrounding the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, by rioters supporting United States President Donald Trump's attempts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Pro-Trump rioters stormed the United States Capitol after assembling on the Ellipse of the Capitol complex for a rally headlined as the "Save America March".
The United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol was a select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives established to investigate the U.S. Capitol attack.
Cassidy Jacqueline Hutchinson is a former White House aide who served as assistant to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the Trump administration.
Kenneth John Chesebro is an American attorney known as the architect of the Trump fake electors plot that conspired to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election. On August 14, 2023, Chesebro was indicted along with eighteen others in the Georgia election racketeering prosecution.
Anthony M. Ornato is the former assistant director of the United States Secret Service Office of Training. He was the service's deputy assistant director who headed the security detail of president Donald Trump until taking a leave of absence when the president named him White House Deputy Chief of Staff for operations in December 2019. After his tenure as a political appointee in the Trump administration, he returned to the Secret Service where he worked as the assistant director in the office of training until August 29, 2022.
After the results of the 2020 United States presidential election determined U.S. president Donald Trump had lost, a scheme was devised by him, his associates and Republican Party officials in seven states to subvert the election by creating and submitting fraudulent certificates of ascertainment to falsely claim Trump had won the electoral college vote in those states. The intent of the scheme was to pass the fraudulent certificates to then-vice president Mike Pence in the hope he would count them, rather than the authentic certificates, and thus overturn Joe Biden's victory. This scheme was defended by a fringe legal theory developed by Trump attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, detailed in the Eastman memos, which claimed a vice president has the constitutional discretion to swap official electors with an alternate slate during the certification process, thus changing the outcome of the electoral college vote and the overall winner of the presidential race. The scheme came to be known as the Pence Card. By April 2024, dozens of Republican state officials and Trump associates had been indicted in four states for their alleged involvement. The federal Smith special counsel investigation is investigating Trump's role in the events. Testimony has revealed that Trump was fully aware of the fake electors scheme, and knew that Eastman's plan for Pence to obstruct the certification of electoral votes was a violation of the Electoral Count Act.
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Save America is a leadership political action committee founded and controlled by former US president Donald Trump. It has been Trump's primary fundraising and political spending arm since he left office.
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