Lawyer Stefan Passantino sued former federal prosecutor and legal commentator Andrew Weissmann for defamation over a post Weissmann made on X. The post identified Passantino as the lawyer who had “coached” a congressional witness “to lie.” Weissmann had approximately 320,000 followers at the time, and Passantino alleged that the post damaged his professional reputation and caused him to lose business.

For Passantino to successfully assert a defamation claim, he was required to plead that (1) Weissmann made a false and defamatory statement concerning him; (2) Weissmann published the statement to a third party without privilege; (3) Weissmann acted with the legally required level of fault; and (4) the statement was actionable without proof of special harm or, alternatively, that its publication caused Passantino special harm.

Because the court assumed without deciding that Passantino was a private figure, the applicable fault standard was negligence, meaning Passantino had to allege facts showing that Weissmann failed to exercise ordinary care in determining whether the statement was true before publishing it. Had Passantino been treated as a public figure, he instead would have been required to plead actual malice, meaning that Weissmann knew the statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for whether it was false.

Weissmann moved for judgment on the pleadings. He argued, among other things, that Passantino had not sufficiently alleged that Weissmann was at fault in publishing the statement. The court granted Weissmann’s motion.

The court found that Passantino had not alleged facts showing that Weissmann lacked reasonable grounds for what he posted. Although the witness had testified that Passantino never expressly told her to lie, the same testimony described Passantino encouraging her to answer “I don’t recall” even when she did remember relevant information. The court concluded that the transcript therefore did not put Weissmann on notice that his characterization was false and instead provided support for it.

The social media setting makes the case particularly useful, as such a context can magnify traditional reputational harms by allowing speech to reach a much larger audience and remain accessible much longer. Here, a short post reduced a complicated factual record to a few pointed words and distributed them to hundreds of thousands of people. But the court’s analysis still came down to a traditional defamation question: whether Weissmann had reasonable grounds for believing what he published was true. The underlying public record was enough to defeat the negligence theory.

Passantino v. Weissmann, No. 23-2780 (LLA) (D.D.C. Sept. 21, 2026)