US Politics

Republicans pressed their attacks on a range of issues against Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe Biden’s nominee to become the first Black woman on the US supreme court. Jackson, who had remained even-tempered throughout marathon questioning during her Senate judiciary committee confirmation hearing, showed impatience over repeated questions posed by Republicans who accused her of being too lenient in sentencing in cases involving child abuse images

Ketanji Brown Jackson faces renewed Republican attacks in Senate grilling
Ketanji Brown Jackson defends against Republican’s claims on child abuse sentences
Ketanji Brown Jackson vows to defend US constitution in opening remarks More

Republicans turn Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing into a political circus Solemn proceedings of confirmation hearing took a nosedive into farce with bizarre moments in Jackson’s epic inquisitionAt 2.54pm on the second day of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearings that will determine whether she takes a seat on the US supreme court, the solemn proceedings took a nosedive into farce.Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas, turned theatrically to an outsized blow-up of a children’s book, Antiracist Baby by Ibram X Kendi. Pointing to a cartoon from its pages of an infant in diapers taking their first walk, he asked Jackson: “Do you agree with this book… that babies are racist?”“Senator,” Jackson began with a sigh. And then she paused for seven full seconds, which in the august setting of the Senate judiciary committee hearing felt like a year.For the one and only time in the 13 hours of questioning that Jackson endured that day, the nominee appeared flummoxed. Or was it flabbergasted?Here she was, aged 51, with almost a decade’s experience as a federal judge behind her and, if confirmed, the history-making distinction of becoming the first Black woman to sit on the nation’s highest court ahead of her. And she was being asked whether babies were racist?“I don’t believe that any child should be made to feel as though they are racist or not valued, or less than, that they are victims, oppressors,” she said eventually. When Cruz refused to drop the subject she gave a more direct answer.“I have not reviewed any of those books,” she said. “They don’t come up in my work as a judge, which I’m respectfully here to address.”That Cruz chose to focus on critical race theory (CRT), the years-old academic theory that has become the latest conservative hot-button issue, in his questioning spoke volumes about the brutal social issue politics of today’s Republican party. That he did so to a Black woman lent the exchange the astringency of a racial dog-whistle.Cruz’s attack was not unique. Four hours before he began his interrogation, the official Twitter account of the Republican National Committee posted a gif of the nominee bearing her initials “KBJ” which are then scratched out and replaced with the letters: “CRT”. Critical race theory is an academic discipline that examines the ways in which racism operates in US laws and society.There was another twist to Cruz’s questioning. The private elementary school at which he claimed CRT was being taught – Antiracist Baby and all – is Georgetown Day School on whose board Jackson sits as a trustee. When GDS was founded in 1945 it too made history as the first integrated school, serving both Black and white children, in the nation’s capital.Lest any of the attendants of the hearings inside the Hart Senate office building or following along on television had doubts about Cruz’s motivations, he grilled Jackson on several other racially-charged subjects. He began by vaunting his own anti-racist credentials by expressing the admiration he shared with Jackson for Martin Luther King.Within seconds of that warm embrace, however, the senator segued to a speech that Jackson made in 2020 – on MLK day – in which she referred to the 1619 Project.The project, initiated by the New York Times, seeks to reframe American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the role of African American women front and centre of the national narrative. Cruz asked Jackson if she agreed with some of its more contested conclusions, which he claimed were “deeply inaccurate and misleading”, to which she replied that she had only mentioned it because it was “well known to the students I was talking to”.Again, she stressed, this was a subject that had absolutely nothing to do with her work – or by implication, the job of a supreme court justice.Outside observers were incensed by Cruz’s tactics. “What we saw today was an attempt to assail the character of Ketanji Brown Jackson, because her record is so wholly unassailable,” Janai Nelson, president and director-counsel of the racial justice organization, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said on MSNBC.Raphael Warnock, the Democratic senator from Georgia and former senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta where King once preached, pondered in the New York Times: “Would they be asking these questions if this were not a Black woman?”There were other awkward moments in Jackson’s epic inquisition, which she survived while barely dropping the perma-smile from her face. There was the moment that Lindsey Graham, Republican senator from South Carolina, flounced out of the hearing having earlier wrongly accused Jackson of having called George W Bush and the then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld “war criminals”.Yet more bizarre was the episode when Marsha Blackburn, Republican senator from Tennessee, asked Jackson whether she could “provide a definition for the word ‘woman’.” “No, I can’t,” came the curt reply.It was all a far cry from the promise delivered by Senator Chuck Grassley, the top Republican in the judiciary committee, at the start of the hearings. There would be no “spectacle” or “political circus” coming from his side of the aisle.Several Republican senators followed that pledge by channelling QAnon. Senators Josh Hawley from Missouri, Cruz and Graham all pursued the inquisitorial line that Jackson had been unduly lenient as a federal district court judge in her sentencing of sex offenders who consume and distribute images of child sex abuse.Though they avoided stating so explicitly, the senators clearly intended to imply that Jackson’s sympathies lay with pedophiles. That’s a short stone’s throw away from the core conspiracy theory peddled by QAnon, the toxic Donald Trump-supporting online movement.At its “Pizzagate” inception during the 2016 presidential campaign, QAnon fantasised about a child trafficking ring around Hillary Clinton and other Democratic leaders and liberal Hollywood celebrities.As Media Matters has noted, the claim that Jackson was lenient towards sex offenders consuming images of children first surfaced last month. A conservative group American Accountability Foundation (AAF) ran an “investigation” into her writings while a student at Harvard law school in which she explored discrepancies in sentencing policy in such cases.The group misleadingly claimed that her writing exposed her as a radical judicial activist dedicated to “social justice engineering”.Days before the confirmation hearings began, Republican senators had taken up AAF’s lead and were plotting how to use it during the confirmation process. Last week Politico obtained a document that was circulating among the senators in which they rehearsed the claim that the judge “routinely handed out light sentence”, and that the lightest of all were in “child pornography cases”.A pedophile-sympathising, critical race theory-loving, judicial activist, radical leftist social engineer. The vision of the nominee that was presented over hours of Republican grilling made for quite the spectacle.But will the political circus work? “They are trying to find some way to make her look less than qualified,” Nelson concluded. “They failed miserably.”TopicsKetanji Brown JacksonUS supreme courtLaw (US)US politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

US ‘will not entertain’ UK trade deal that risks Good Friday agreement US congressman Richard Neal says peace deal must not be held ‘hostage over domestic politics’ A bilateral trade deal between the US and the UK is “desirable” but will not progress while the Northern Ireland peace deal is being used for domestic political purposes, one of the most powerful American congressmen has warned.Richard Neal, the chairman of the ways and means committee, has told the Guardian: “We will not entertain a trade agreement if there is any jeopardy to the Good Friday agreement.TopicsNorthern IrelandBrexitEuropeIrelandForeign policyEuropean UnionUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Trump committed ‘numerous’ felonies, said resigning New York prosecutor – reportNew York Times obtains letter by Mark Pomerantz condemning new district attorney’s decision not to prosecute ex-president A Manhattan prosecutor who investigated Donald Trump’s financial dealings wrote in a resignation letter that he believed Trump “is guilty of numerous felony violations” and blasted the new district attorney for not moving ahead with an indictment, the New York Times reported.Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne, two top prosecutors on the Manhattan district attorney’s criminal investigation of Trump, resigned abruptly last month, amid reports that the investigation into the former president’s finances was foundering.The newly elected district attorney, Alvin Bragg, was reportedly more skeptical than his predecessor that the evidence his office’s attorneys had gathered against Trump would be enough to convict him.In a February resignation letter obtained by the New York Times, Pomerantz wrote that the team of lawyers investigating Trump had “no doubt” he had “committed crimes” and that Bragg’s decision not to move ahead with prosecuting Trump “will doom any future prospects that Mr Trump will be prosecuted for the criminal conduct we have been investigating”.“His financial statements were false, and he has a long history of fabricating information relating to his personal finances and lying about his assets to banks, the national media, counterparties, and many others, including the American people,” Pomerantz reportedly wrote.Republican says Trump asked him to ‘rescind’ 2020 election and remove Biden from officeRead moreThe clock is ticking on the case against Trump, as the current term of the grand jury which has been hearing evidence expires in April.Ronald Fischetti, an attorney for Trump, told the Guardian that the resignation letter simply reflected the prosecuting team’s failure to make a convincing legal case against the former president, describing his client’s “innocence”.“Pomerantz had several occasions to meet with Alvin Bragg, the district attorney, and his senior staff to lay out exactly what he intended to present to the grand jury in order to get an indictment, and he failed,” Fischetti said. “He was unable to convince the DA and his senior staff that he had sufficient evidence to warrant an indictment.”“Mr Bragg should be commended for not doing this on the basis of politics, and just doing it on the basis of law, which he’s supposed to do,” Fischetti said.While the resignation letter conceded that the case against Trump could be challenging and that there were “risks” of bringing it to court, it argued that there was a strong public interest in prosecuting Trump “even if a conviction is not certain”.The former Manhattan district attorney Cy Vance, who had been deeply involved in the case, had “directed the team to present evidence to a grand jury and to seek an indictment of Mr Trump and other defendants as soon as reasonably possible”, Pomerantz reportedly wrote, but Bragg, who was sworn in this January, reviewed the case and did not agree.Pomerantz believed Bragg’s decision not to seek an indictment of Trump was “made in good faith” but also “misguided and completely contrary to the public interest”.Pomerantz did not respond to a request for comment.“The investigation continues,” Danielle Filson, a spokesperson for the district attorney, wrote in an email. “A team of experienced prosecutors is working every day to follow the facts and the law. There is nothing we can or should say at this juncture about an ongoing investigation.”A spokesperson for the Trump Organization called Pomerantz a “never-Trumper” in a statement to the New York Times.TopicsDonald TrumpNew YorkUS politicsLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

Washington joins nine other states in restricting gun magazine capacity sizeA package of bills signed by Jay Inslee tighten the state’s gun laws, including adding restrictions to a law prohibiting ghost guns The Washington governor Jay Inslee signed a package of bills Wednesday tightening the state’s gun laws, including a measure that bans the manufacture, distribution and sale of firearm magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.Washington joins nine other states, including California and New Jersey, that restrict magazine capacity size.“We are not willing to accept gun violence as a normal part of life in the state of Washington,” said Inslee, a Democrat, at a news conference where he was surrounded by lawmakers and other supporters of the new laws.The capitol was closed to the public for several hours before and after the bill signing. A spokesperson for the Washington state patrol said that there was no specific threat, but that the temporary closure was a “prudent precaution”.A father used a ghost gun to kill his three daughters. It’s a sign of a growing crisisRead moreWashington’s measure, which takes effect 1 July, does not prohibit the possession of such magazines. It also includes exceptions to magazine limits for law enforcement and corrections officers, members of the armed forces, Washington’s national guard and licensed firearms dealers who sell to those institutions.Violations would be a gross misdemeanor, which in Washington is punishable by up to 364 days in county jail, a maximum fine of up to $5,000, or both.The measure was requested by Democratic attorney general Bob Ferguson, who said he was motivated to push for the bill after a 2016 shooting at a party in Mukilteo in which a 30-round magazine was used, killing three teens and seriously injuring another.“It’s individuals who are directly impacted by gun violence. When they speak, politicians respond,” Ferguson said.The new law also makes selling a prohibited magazine or offering one for distribution or sale a violation of Washington’s Consumer Protection Act, which allows the attorney general’s office to take action on alleged violations of the act to get restitution and civil penalties.In a statement issued after the bill signing, the Sacramento, California-based Firearms Policy Coalition said that it plans to lead a lawsuit over the new law, saying that it “condemns this latest act of state aggression and will not allow this law to go unchallenged”. The group said it was looking for Washington residents who could be potential plaintiffs in the planned action.Ferguson said that he was confident that the ban was constitutional and that his office could successfully defend any potential litigation. He pointed to appellate history with other states with bans, including California, where the ninth circuit court of appeals overturned a ruling by two of its judges and upheld California’s law in November.Inslee also signed a measure that prohibits people from knowingly bringing weapons either openly carried or carried with a concealed pistol license to ballot counting sites and on-campus school board meetings. The new law also bans openly carried firearms at local government meetings and election-related facilities such as county election offices, off-campus school board meetings and local government meetings, though people who have concealed pistol licenses would be allowed to carry their concealed weapon in those locations.Firearms are already prohibited at several designated places statewide, including restricted areas of jails, courtrooms, taverns and commercial airports. And last year, lawmakers approved a ban on openly carrying guns and other weapons at the Washington state capitol, part of the capitol campus and public protests statewide.“No one should be prevented from accessing their government due to fear of armed intimidation,” said representative Tana Senn, the bill’s sponsor.Law enforcement is exempt from the restrictions, as are any security personnel hired at a location.California scrambles to ban ‘ghost guns’ as untraceable weapons’ popularity soarsRead moreViolation of the law would be a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 90 days in jail and fines of up to $1,000. Second or subsequent violations would be a gross misdemeanor.Additionally, any person convicted would have their concealed pistol license revoked for three years.Under the measure, a person must knowingly be in violation of the law in order for the criminal penalty to apply.A third measure signed by Inslee on Wednesday adds further restrictions to the law on the manufacture, sale, or possession of so-called ghost guns by prohibiting people from possessing components to build an untraceable firearm, as well as possessing any firearms built after 2019 that don’t have serial numbers. Hobbyists will be able to continue making guns at home, but under the new law they must use components with serial numbers.TopicsWashington stateUS gun controlUS politicsGun crimenewsReuse this content More

Madeleine Albright, first female US secretary of state, dies aged 84Former cabinet member was ‘a trailblazer’ as the highest-ranking woman in history when she was named to the role in 1996

Obituary: Madeleine Albright, 1937-2022
Madeleine Albright, who came to the US as a refugee and made history as the first woman to be secretary of state, has died. She was 84.Madeleine Albright: ‘The things that are happening are genuinely, seriously bad’Read moreA family statement read: “We are heartbroken to announce that Dr Madeleine Albright, the 64th US secretary of state and the first woman to hold that position, passed away earlier today.“The cause was cancer. She was surrounded by family and friends. We have lost a loving mother, grandmother, sister, aunt and friend.”Bill Clinton, the president she served, paid tribute to “one of the finest secretaries of state, an outstanding UN ambassador, a brilliant professor and an extraordinary human being”.Born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague in 1937 but known as Madeleine since infancy, Albright fled with her family for London in 1939 after the Nazis took Czechoslovakia. She came to the US in 1948.She was raised Catholic and only decades later discovered her parents were Jewish and that several family members were murdered in the Holocaust.After the election of Clinton in 1992, Albright was first ambassador to the United Nations, then secretary of state. The dominant foreign policy themes of the time were the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, including the wars in the former Yugoslavia, the quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians and the rise of fundamentalist Islam in the years before 9/11.Albright became secretary of state in 1997, at the time the highest-ranking woman in the history of US government. The role made her third-in-line to the presidency, though like her predecessors Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski she would not have been able to fill the role, not being a natural born US citizen as defined in the constitution.On Wednesday, the state department spokesperson, Ned Price, said: “The impact that Secretary Albright … had on this building is felt every single day in just about every single corridor. She was a trailblazer as the first female secretary of state and quite literally opened doors for a large element of our work force.”Ben Rhodes, a former foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama, said: “Madeleine Albright was always exceedingly generous to and encouraging of younger people coming up in national security. In what is usually a tough and competitive field, she always extended a hand, opened her home, and shared her wisdom.”Val Demings, a Florida congresswoman and Senate candidate, called Albright “not only a trailblazer and breaker of glass ceilings, she was a brilliant, passionate, dedicated public servant, who cared deeply for our values and our safety”.In a statement issued with his wife Hillary Clinton, one of Albright’s successors as secretary of state, Bill Clinton said “few leaders have been so perfectly suited for the times in which they served” and called Albright “a passionate force for freedom, democracy and human rights”.Hillary Clinton recalled Albright’s “unfailingly wise counsel” and said: “So many people around the world are alive and living better lives because of her service.”Bill Clinton’s successor, George W Bush, saluted “a foreign-born foreign minister who understood first-hand the importance of free societies for peace in our world”.The threat of authoritarianism was the subject of Albright’s last book, Fascism: A Warning, published in 2018.“Democracy is not the easiest form of government,” she told the Guardian then. “It does require attention and participation and carrying out the social contract. And it doesn’t deliver immediately. What we have to learn is how to get democracy to deliver because people want to vote and eat.”In her book, Albright called Donald Trump “the first anti-democratic president in modern US history” and “actually really smart – evil smart, I think”.But she cast her eye worldwide.“The things that are happening are genuinely, seriously bad,” she said. “Some of them are really bad. They’re not to do with Trump; it is the evolution of a number of different trends.”Four years on, as Vladimir Putin amassed Russian forces on the border with Ukraine last month, Albright published a column in the New York Times in which she recalled being the first senior US figure to meet the Russian leader, in Moscow in 2000.“Flying home,” she wrote, “I recorded my impressions. ‘Putin is small and pale,’ I wrote, ‘so cold as to be almost reptilian.’ He claimed to understand why the Berlin Wall had to fall but had not expected the whole Soviet Union to collapse. ‘Putin is embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness.’”If Putin now ordered an invasion of Ukraine, Albright said, he would make a historic mistake. A month later, Russian troops are bogged down in brutal fighting and Russia is an international pariah.Joe Biden heads to Europe in effort to keep pressure on RussiaRead moreIn her interview with the Guardian, Albright said the US, which had recently chosen Trump over Hillary Clinton, had a problem with women in politics.“I don’t understand it, frankly,” she said. “We are very good at being No 1 in many things and yet we are not in this and I don’t know the answer. Because there are certainly very qualified women.“When my name came up to be secretary of state, you would think that I was an alien, you know. People actually said: ‘The Arabs won’t deal with a woman.’”Lamenting Clinton’s defeat, she said: “I think she would have been a remarkable president. And I think that it’s very disappointing.”In 2012, Albright was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian honour. Bestowing the award, Obama said: “Once, at a naturalisation ceremony, an Ethiopian man came up to [Albright] and said, ‘Only in America can a refugee meet the secretary of state.’“And she replied, ‘Only in America can a refugee become the secretary of state.’”On Wednesday, Obama called Albright “a champion for democratic values” and said: “Michelle and I send our thoughts to the Albright family and everyone who knew and served with a truly remarkable woman.”TopicsUS newsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

‘A trailblazer’: political leaders pay tribute to Madeleine AlbrightObama, Bush, Blair and others hail first female secretary of state: ‘She lived out the American dream’ Tributes flooded in on Wednesday to Madeleine Albright, the first woman to hold the position of US secretary of state, who has died at the age of 84.“The impact that she has had on this building is felt every single day in just about every single corner … she was a trailblazer,” said the state department spokesperson, Ned Price.Albright came to the US in the 1940s as a refugee. Born Marie Jana Korbelová, she became the US’s top diplomat in 1996 and served during the last four years of Bill Clinton’s administration. She was the highest-ranking woman in the history of US government at that time.Madeleine Albright, first female US secretary of state, dies aged 84Read moreIn his tribute, the former president George W Bush said Albright had “lived out the American dream”.“Laura and I are heartbroken by the news of Madeleine Albright’s death. She lived out the American dream and helped others realize itHe added: “I respect her love of country and public service, and Laura and I are grateful to have called Madeline [sic] Albright our friend.”Albright was a young girl when her family fled Prague for London after the Nazis took Czechoslovakia in 1939. She was raised Catholic but years later discovered that her parents were Jewish and that several family members had been murdered in the Holocaust. Having returned to Prague after the war, Albright and her family fled to the US in 1948 after a Soviet-sponsored communist coup seized power.“Madeleine was one of the most remarkable people I ever had the privilege to work with,” the former British prime minister Tony Blair said in a statement. “She had the sharpest of brains, the most lively conscience and the deepest compassion for humanity … She was an icon and an inspiration. I will miss her greatly. The world will miss her.”As US secretary of state, Albright advocated for Nato expansion and pushed for the alliance to intervene in the Balkans to end ethnic cleansing and genocide in Kosovo.“As the first woman to serve as America’s top diplomat,” said President Barack Obama in 2012 when Albright was presented with the Medal of Freedom, “Madeleine’s courage and toughness helped bring peace to the Balkans and paved the way for progress in some of the most unstable corners of the world.”The Florida congresswoman and Democratic Women’s Caucus co-chair Lois Frankel tweeted on Wednesday: “I’m sorry to hear about the passing of Madeline [sic] Albright. Her historic term as Secretary of State made our nation and world a better place, and she set the stage for women to follow in her footsteps. She was an outstanding person, public servant, & patriot who will be deeply missed.”Albright opposed the US’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, though she later expressed support for US troops in the country. But critics of Albright called out her support for US intervention more broadly and previous comments she made about the consequences of US sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s.During a 1996 interview with Lesley Stahl on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Albright was asked about the cost of those sanctions and the impact they had on Iraqi children.“We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” asked Stahl.Albright replied: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”Before her death, Albright apologized for those comments, calling her remarks “totally stupid” in a New York Times interview published in 2020.TopicsUS newsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

Madeleine Albright obituaryDiplomat and scholar of international relations who served as the first female US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who has died of cancer aged 84, was the first woman to hold the office of secretary of state of the United States. It fell to her to cope with the painful dilemmas presented for the US by the breakup of Yugoslavia and the rise of Islamic opposition in the Middle East.While she fulfilled the role in the administration of President Bill Clinton, she could not take the place that office usually confers as third in succession to the president because she was not a “natural born citizen” of the US. Like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, secretaries of state in the Nixon and Carter administrations, she had been a refugee from Europe. Like them also, Albright came to the job not via business or politics but through an academic background in the study of international relations.Like Brzezinski, her professor at Columbia University, she was the daughter of a diplomat. Her father, Josef Korbel, took refuge from the communist government of his native Czechoslovakia, becoming a professor at the University of Denver. She was brought up a Roman Catholic and became an Anglican after her marriage, but when Albright became secretary of state, she received letters telling her that her parents were Jewish, and a Washington Post journalist, Michael Dobbs, after painstaking research, convinced her that this might be true. This caused a good deal of comment, some of it critical of her having concealed her ancestry. The truth seems to be that she was genuinely ignorant of her Jewish heritage.She concluded that in the Czechoslovakia of the 1930s, where Jews were often seen by Czechs as part of the German minority, her parents, Josef and his wife, Anna (nee Spieglová), thought she would have a safer life if she were seen to be Czech. Three of her grandparents subsequently died in Nazi concentration camps.Eldest of three children, she was born Marie Jana Korbelová in Prague. Her family took refuge from the Nazis in Switzerland, where she was educated at the Préalpina Institut pour Jeunes Filles on Lake Geneva. Madeleine was a French version of her Czech name.During the second world war, her family moved to London, which became the headquarters of the Czech government in exile, and Madeleine was brought up first in Kensington Park Road, Notting Hill, then in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, and Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. Later, the Korbels returned to Prague, but in 1948, when the communists took over there, they moved to the US.In 1957 she went to Wellesley College, near Boston, one of the elite women’s colleges. There she became an American citizen. When working a summer vacation shift at the Denver Post, she met a scion of one of the most powerful American newspaper dynasties of the time, Joseph Albright, descendant of the founder of the Chicago Tribune. They married in 1959.If Madeleine had been born with a silver spoon, Joe Albright’s spoons were of the rarest platinum. His family was at the heart of American business, political and social life. At different times his relatives owned the Tribune, the Washington Times-Herald, the New York Daily News and Long Island’s Newsday, and they traded properties with William Randolph Hearst. Madeleine Albright took a master’s degree, then a doctorate in international relations at Columbia University, New York, where Brzezinski was one of her teachers. From 1976 to 1978 she worked as a legislative assistant to Senator Ed Muskie, a Democrat, of Maine. In 1978 she was recruited by Brzezinski to do congressional liaison on the national security staff at the Carter White House. After Jimmy Carter’s defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, she went to the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, where she undertook a study of the new politics of eastern Europe.In 1981, when her husband left her, Albright threw herself into the academic, political, social and fundraising worlds in Washington. In 1982 she began to teach at Georgetown University, and she worked on the election campaign staffs of Geraldine Ferraro, Democratic candidate for vice-president in 1984, and of Michael Dukakis, presidential candidate in 1988.Albright, with her considerable expertise in both domestic and international politics, and her ability to speak several foreign languages, was a natural choice for Clinton, when he was elected president in 1992, to choose as US ambassador at the United Nations. There she soon demonstrated charm and competence, occasionally tarnished by a certain proneness to accident. She miscalculated badly when she advised that Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian nationalist leader, would cave in after brief bombing during the Kosovo crisis.More seriously for her reputation, when she was asked on NBC television by the journalist Lesley Stahl about the alleged death of half a million children as a result of sanctions imposed on Iraq, Albright responded that “we think the price is worth it”. The remark portrayed her as hardbitten, which was far from the case. The sanctions policy had been in place long before the Clinton administration, but the comment was not forgotten.By the time of the Clinton administration, a female secretary of state was, if not exactly an idea whose time had come, at least not unthinkable, if the woman were well known and well liked in the Washington Democratic establishment. It is said that Clinton asked Albright if she was happy as ambassador to the UN; she replied that she was, but that she would rather be secretary of state. Clinton appointed her in 1997, at the beginning of his second term.When George W Bush was elected president in 2000, Albright slipped back comfortably into her role as a popular member of the establishment, greatly in demand as a speaker at conferences. She founded the Albright Group, to give political advice to corporate giants such as Coca-Cola, Merck and the insurance behemoth Marsh and McLennan, as well as a private equity firm, Albright Capital Management. In 2003 she joined the board of the New York Stock Exchange, and twice in 2006 she was invited to the White House to advise Bush. In the 2008 election she was in the Democratic camp as an adviser to Hillary Clinton in her campaign for the presidency, and again in 2016 – she told the Guardian: “I think she would have been a remarkable president”.In 2012, when she published Prague Winter, partly an account of the politics of central Europe in the run-up to the second world war, partly an account of her discovery that she was Jewish, reviewers and readers seemed much more interested in how she could not have known that she was Jewish than in her political thought or career. She was awarded the presidential medal of freedom by Barack Obama later that year.She is survived by her three daughters, Anne, Alice and Katherine, and six grandchildren. Madeleine Albright, diplomat and political adviser, born 15 May 1937; died 23 March 2022 TopicsUS politicsUS foreign policyBill ClintonHillary ClintonobituariesReuse this content More