CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said Thursday on CNN’s “Newsroom” former Trump White House lawyer Stefan Passantino could be in legal trouble over his advice to Cassidy Hutchinson.
Political correspondent Sara Murray said, “When she details the pressure and talks about having this lawyer from Trump world and feeling like Trump was always sort of watching what she was doing around the committee even though she wanted to be forthcoming. She said at one point, ‘It was almost like I felt like I had Trump looking over my shoulder because I knew in some fashion it would get back to him if I said anything he found disloyal. The prospect of that genuinely scared me.’ She recalls how Passantino and other Trump allies dangled these job offers in front of her, said she would be taken care of as long as she stayed loyal to the former president. She also made a point to tell the committee that while Passantino had encouraged her to mislead the committee, he didn’t straight up to tell her to lie. This is what she said, ‘I want to make it clear, Stefan never told me to lie. He specifically told me I don’t want you to perjury yourself, but I don’t recall isn’t perjury. They don’t know what you can and cannot recall.’ She went on to get a new legal team and testified publicly before the interviews that we’re now reading the transcripts from.”
Anchor Ana Cabrera asked, “Did her lawyer cross a line?”
Honig said, “I don’t recall is a common refrain from legal proceedings whether trials or this kind of testimony. It’s important to understand, though: that is not an automatic do-whatever-you-want-for-free card. It can be difficult to disprove, but if you’re a lawyer, and your client does know or does recall something, and you tell them, ‘just say you don’t recall,’ that crosses a line. All these other pressure tactics, they happen. It’s not OK. But the line is crossed if he tells her to testify falsely, and that would be false if that’s the way it proves out.”
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