How I Beat a Trump Official's Nasty Lawsuit

Keith Bass, former head of the CIA’s Medical Office, sued me for a million bucks. Substack's Defender program came to my aid.

There’s theory, and practice. One theory is that frivolous law suits are easily dismissed. When you’re the victim of a flimsy defamation suit, however, the reality is that practice is hard. For an independent journalist, like so many of us today, it’s not easy at all.

So it began with me one day this past January, when a process server showed up on my front porch and handed me a summons announcing that Keith Bass, a former head of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, had sued me for $1 million. The claim was that I’d maliciously and willfully defamed him by reporting that he’d been “effectively fired” in 2021 from the job. My report, which was generated by a tip that Bass had just been nominated to head the Pentagon’s health services, was accurate.

I confess that I, too, initially scoffed at Bass’s suit. Multiple, authoritative sources had corroborated the original tip I’d gotten about Bass’s ouster. I’d also noted in my piece that in December 2024, the Senate Intelligence Committee had released a bipartisan report that blasted the CIA medical office’s handling of Covid cases, as well as so-called Havana Syndrome, the mysterious set of illnesses that scores of CIA, State Department and other government employees had claimed disabled them. The first cases, which the agency calls Anomalous Health Incidents, or AHI, were reported by officers stationed in Havana in 2016. In-depth reporting in 2024 fingered Russian special services as responsible for the attacks.

I also scoffed at Bass’s claim that he’d been materially damaged by my reporting. Frankly, I’d moved on and forgotten about him after I wrote my story, but the fact was that he had actually gotten the Pentagon job without any hiccups. Hardly anyone had taken note of my story. Only Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had asked Bass about it in a written questionnaire during his confirmation process. It had never come up in the public hearing, which eventually, and perfunctorily, approved his nomination, along with two others.

(Warren had also inquired about Bass’s previous tour from 2013 to 2019 as director of the White House Medical Unit, which under his management in the first Trump administration had “severe and systemic problems,” including the provision of “prescription medications, including controlled substances, to ineligible White House staff,” according to a DOD Inspector General’s report. I’d overlooked that in my concentration on his CIA tenure.)

Accordingly, since his nomination had sailed through with a mere burp the year before, I was doubly dismissive about his suit’s merits: How had he suffered? It looked liked he’d never missed a meal between his departure from the CIA to his appointment as assistant secretary of Defense (or “War,” as they put it) for Health Affairs. Why, moreover, had he taken legal action that would almost certainly bang up against the very high bar of 1st Amendment protections? Did he just wake up one morning and, inspired by one of Donald Trump’s constant defamation suits against the news media over the decades, and decide to sue me? Did he think I was a cash cow?

Whatever, the suit had to be answered. And it wasn’t something I could afford. Luckily for me, Substack has a legal defender program available to all the content creators on its site, where SpyTalk has been publishing since Aug. 31, 2020.

In January 2025, Substack founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi had publicly denounced “spurious legal threats to silence reporting and opinions that challenge their interests” and proudly announced an expansion of the Defender program to its writers in Canada and the U.K. “We’ve seen firsthand that one of the greatest threats to that freedom is the ability of the wealthy and powerful to use spurious legal threats to silence reporting and opinions that challenge their interests,” they added.

I reached out. They promptly responded, telling me they’d offered my case to two (brilliant, as it turned out) lawyers from Bean, Kinney & Korman, a firm just across the Potomac from me in Arlington, Va., who would represent me pro bono. Within days Kandis M. Koustenis and Allison K. Riddle called, saying that, with my permission, they intended to vigorously defend me. Substack would pick up their costs.

How do you spell relief?

The Battle is Engaged

By mid-February, Koustenis and Riddle had drafted a brilliant motion to dismiss the suit. “When defamation lawsuits are used as a tool to suppress journalism about this country’s public figures, especially figures that may become key in the next executive administration, they chill free speech and deprive the public of information pertaining to matters of public concern,” they noted. “Such strategic lawsuits against public participation (called “SLAPPs”) have become common in recent years. Indeed, the rise in attacks on free speech is alarming.” This was clearly one of them.

(See more on SLAPP suits here.)

On July 9, we faced off with Bass’s counsel before federal Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles in a cavernous courtroom of the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria, Va. Giles didn’t think much of the arguments put forth by Bass’s counsel. She dismissed their case—but left open a 14-day window for them to amend their complaint with some “actual meat on the bones,” as she put it, of the allegations against me. It seemed to me that Judge Giles, an Obama appointee, was bending over backwards to be fair.

Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles (photo: UVA Law School 2023).

The days passed. Crickets. Amid deafening silence from Bass & co., on Monday, July 27, we declared victory. Their case was dead.

“We are gratified by the Court’s final judgment dismissing the case with prejudice and proud to have represented Jeff Stein,” Koustenis and Riddle said in a statement. “The Court concluded that the complaint did not allege the specific facts necessary to support actual malice, which is an important constitutional safeguard protecting journalists from lawsuits that could chill reporting on public officials and matters of public concern.”

Speaking of gratified, it hardly needs saying that none of this could have been achieved without the full support of Substack and its Defender program, which bankrolled my pro bono lawyers. I won’t say what they billed Substack, but it was many, many thousands—and every dollar very well earned.

“At Substack, we believe free speech and the free press are fundamental to a trustworthy media system, and we are committed to defending it,” Adam Inglis, general counsel at Substack, said in an email when I asked him for comment. “Substack’s Defender program was built to protect independent journalism like Jeff Stein’s work at SpyTalk, so that writers faced with spurious legal challenges aren’t forced to choose between their reporting and their livelihoods.”

Substack’s CEO & cofounder, Chris Best, posted a comment about the victory on the company’s social media site, Notes.

“Independent journalists should be free to do their work, even when powerful people dislike their reporting,” he wrote. “We’re proud to back Jeff here, and to help create a world where people think twice before messing with creators on Substack.”

Good vibes all around. But it shouldn’t have come to this. To me, Bass’s suit amounted to pure harrassment, of a kind that’s become all too common from the Trump camp. Such suits aren’t “ridiculous” or “flimsy” —not when you’re the target. They suck up your time, your mind space, and your sleep. You imagine the worst, like having to sell your house if the case proceeds and financial support evaporates.

I could go on, and on. . .But I have work to do.