Sarah Palin threatens to sue The New York Times over retracted article linking her to Gabby Giffords

FRIDAY, JUN 16, 2017 06:11 PM EDT

Sarah Palin threatens to sue The New York Times over retracted article linking her to Gabby Giffords shooting

New York Times, Palin trade jabs over who's to blame for political violence

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD

The same day that the New York Times published a news story that attempted to link Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to the political violence he has explicitly and repeatedly denounced, the paper also published an editorial that falsely claimed the 2011 shooting of then-representative Gabby Giffords was inspired by a political ad put out by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

While the shooting and Palin’s ad took place sometime around each other, there has never been any evidence that Giffords’ attacker, Jared Loughner, was ever aware of Palin’s placement of a crosshairs on Giffords’ congressional district.

Moreover, Loughner’s obsession with the Arizona congresswoman appears to have begun in 2007, a year before Palin was tapped to become the Republican Party’s vice presidential nominee. Not a right-wing radical by any stretch of the imagination, Loughner’s crime appears to have been motivated by untreated paranoid schizophrenia.

Seemingly unaware of these facts, some of which were previously uncovered by the Times itself, the paper’s editorial board published an essay this week claiming that in the case of Giffords and Palin, “the link to political incitement was clear.”

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http://www.salon.com/2017/06/16/sarah-palin-threatens-to-sue-the-new-york-times-over-retracted-article-linking-her-to-gabby-giffords-shooting/