In June 2017, the editorial page published a piece that linked political incitement to the Congressional baseball shooting as well as the 2011 mass shooting in Arizona that wounded then-Rep. Gabby Giffords. The piece cited SarahPAC's map of targeted electoral districts as targeting individual Democratic politicians. These parts of the piece were later removed, but in response, Sarah Palin (the founder of SarahPAC) filed a defamation lawsuit against "The New York Times". Bennet was called to testify in response to Palin's lawsuit. Palin's suit was dismissed in 2017, only to be reinstated in 2019.