The judge presiding over Sarah Palin’s civil suit against the New York Times appeared to take a swipe at the former Alaska governor on Monday, mocking her vaccine status after she tested positive for COVID-19.
Palin’s civil suit against the Times was scheduled to begin on Monday, but due to her illness, the trial has been delayed to February 3.
“Ms. Palin has tested positive for coronavirus,” U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff told the court, according to the Guardian. “She is, of course, unvaccinated.”
Palin sued the Times in 2017 after the paper published an editorial that erroneously linked her political rhetoric to the 2011 mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz. that left six people dead and gravely wounded Gabrielle Giffords, then a Democratic member of Congress.
After a backlash, the Times corrected the defamatory editorial.
A Times spokesperson told CNN: “We published an editorial about an important topic that contained an inaccuracy. We set the record straight with a correction. We are deeply committed to fairness and accuracy in our journalism, and when we fall short, we correct our errors publicly, as we did in this case.”
Immediately following the shooting in January 2011, Democrats and their allies in the media tried to gin up public outrage against Palin over a GOP strategy map she had posted on Facebook in 2010 that featured crosshairs on targeted Democratic congressional districts. The media mob overtly accused her of inciting Jared Lee Loughner, the mentally ill, left-leaning assailant, to target and kill Giffords, whose district was targeted on her map.
Rakoff’s comment about Palin’s vaccine status seemed odd and inappropriate given the fact that fully vaccinated and boosted people can also be infected with COVID-19. The latest data, in fact, shows that fully vaccinated people are more susceptible to the Omicron variant than the unvaccinated.
Palin, 57, also also tested positive for COVID last March.
Journalist Benjamin Weingarten, who writes for The Federalist and RealClearInvestigations, found the judge’s comment to be troubling.
“How is Sarah Palin supposed to get a fair trial if this is the perspective of the federal judge presiding over her case against the NYT?” Weingarten tweeted.
American Greatness reached out to the former governor for comment but did not receive an immediate response.