page 21. on monday, february 7th 2022. i received a call in the afternoon from stephen passantino. i had never worked with stephen. we don t really overlap. and i never really heard of him. all i know is that he he had called to let me know that he was my attorney. and was a brief call. let him know that and i was like i probably should find an engagement letter and he said no no no, we are not doing that. we ll have you taken care of. i said, i remember asking him. i don t have to sign an engagement letter? because that was sort of the first alarm bell in my head that went off because i want something in writing for myself because i already have a tendency to overthink things. and ahead never had to retain an attorney before. by do know enough to know that you should be signing an
engagement letter, so then i d ask them. or i thought. that is perfectly fine, do you mind telling me where the funding for this is coming from? i would want to thank them. i want to thank whoever it is, because i kind of like figuring things out. and he said if you want to know at the end, we will let you know. but we are not telling people where the funding is coming from right now. don t worry. we are taking care of you. you are never going to get a bill for this. so that is what you worried about. i was like okay, that s what i was worried about. but it wasn t the only thing i was worried about. stephen passantino will be disbarred in washington d.c. if that testimony is proven to be true. he refused to tell his client who was paying for his clients legal representation. he will be disbarred that if that is proven to be true. his testimony, released today was strong enough to get that
letter for his services. there s probably an absence of an engagement letter. there were text messages giving her these job offers right before her testimony before the committee. the job offers are disturbing. to that point hutchinson also talked about an interaction she had with mark meadows, okay the former white house chief of staff so central to all of this. the committee says we don t know whether he s talking to the doj or not. she says the night before she s scheduled to go back to the committee for the second time a meadows aide tells hutchinson, quote, well, mark meadows wants me to let you know he knows you re loyal and you re going to do the right thing tomorrow and going to protect the boss. that s very clear. does this put meadows in legal jeopardy? absolutely. the only thing in some sense he can hang onto here he didn t say it directly. according to her that it s through an intermediary who s a senior aide to him, the current spokesperson for him. i seene intermedi
this is wrong? there s no doubt in my mind whatsoever. he would have to say that he did not say these things to her. one of them is after she answers a question by the committee she doesn t recall, she says to him i need to tell them, and he says they don t know what you know. that s telling her to lie. right she s saying i recall and he s saying you don t. that s a lie. nixon lawyer s and senior aides went to jail for those kinds of things. he also says explicitly according to her this is to protect the president. if what she says is true, it s open and shut. the question is can she prove it or could the justice department prove it? and then we have a bunch of correspondenting information. she told her mother, she told a friend, contemporaneous she told someone else so they could arrange a back channel to the committee. he also did something very bizarre. he didn t give an engagement
Newark Partners Meredith Kaplan Stoma and Jeffrey Leonard secured a significant appellate win on behalf of an attorney in a legal malpractice matter when the U.S.