Tag: Bill Clinton

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US presidents gather to honour Jesse Jackson at memorial service

Former US presidents, celebrities and thousands of members of the public have gathered to honour civil rights leader, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who died last month.

Former presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton were among those who spoke at a memorial service in Chicago for the activist.

Mourners included former Vice President Kamala Harris, filmmaker Tyler Perry and former basketball star Isiah Thomas. The service also featured performances, including from singer and actress Jennifer Hudson.

Jackson, who worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr, twice ran to be the Democratic nominee for president and founded the Rainbow PUSH coalition, a social justice and civil rights non-profit.

While praising Jackson in his remarks at the service, Obama made a thinly veiled mention of US President Donald Trump. He said, “Each day we wake up to some new assault on our democratic institutions”.

He said the late reverend inspired people to take a harder path and called “on each of us to be heralds of change”.

Former Vice President Harris received a standing ovation when she spoke at the service. She appeared to take a jab at Trump, saying, “Let me just start out by saying: I predicted a lot of what is happening right now. I hate to say I told you so, but we did see it coming”.

But, she added, that she didn’t realise they would be tackling this moment without Jackson’s guidance.

Calling Jackson “impatient,” she noted, “He did not waste time waiting, even when the doors in front of him were barred and bolted, even if those on the other side hesitated or even ignored him. He always devised a way through”.

Civil rights leader, the Reverend Al Sharpton, who worked closely with Jackson during the civil rights movement, was also among the speakers. (BBC)

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Bill Clinton grilled by House in Epstein deposition

Former President Bill Clinton denied wrongdoing in his relationship with accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein as House Republicans grilled him on Feb. 27 about the late financier’s fundraising, numerous visits to the White House and pictures in Justice Department files.

Clinton, the first former president forced to testify before Congress, told the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in his opening statement that he “had no idea of the crimes Epstein was committing.” He dismissed the 20-year-old pictures from the department’s files and Epstein’s estate.

“I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong,” Clinton said. “As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse, not only would I not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing – I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals.”

Upon exiting the session, Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer, R-Kentucky, said questioning the former president was “very productive” while declining to elaborate.

“You’ll see the video. … Everybody knows President Clinton. He’s got Southern people skills; he’s a charming individual,” the congressman said. “We picked up new facts; we asked the Clintons where we should go from here.”

The former president’s deposition at the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center, near the Clintons’ home in suburban New York, comes just a day after his wife and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified. The former first lady, who was also subpoenaed, told the committee on Feb. 26 she didn’t know Epstein and never flew on his plane. She called her deposition “repetitive” and a “fishing expedition.”

Video of the depositions will be released “within the next 24 hours,” Comer suggested.

GOP committee members said they have questions for the former first couple because Epstein visited the White House 17 times while Bill Clinton was president and then Clinton traveled 27 times on his private plane after leaving office. Clinton also appeared in a number of pictures released in the Epstein files with celebrities or in more casual surroundings with the faces of women redacted.

Comer said documents from the Justice Department and Epstein’s estate portray the late financier as raising money for the Clinton Global Initiative, a foundation seeking action on issues such as the climate and health care. Hillary Clinton told the committee Feb. 26 to ask her husband about it because she was a senator during the period in question.

“This is a historical day for the United States Congress,” Comer said. “Nobody is accusing anyone of any wrongdoing. But I think the American people have a lot of questions.”

The inquiry comes as lawmakers and women who accused Epstein of abuse have forced the Justice Department to released 3 million pages of documents about his criminal investigation. But millions more pages remain sealed, and President Donald Trump has said the country should move on.

Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal charges of child sex trafficking. His associate Ghislaine Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison term for conspiring to transport minors for illicit sex. Critics of the investigation have questioned why more coconspirators haven’t been charged. (USAToday)

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US Civil Rights Leader Jesse Jackson dies at 84

Veteran US civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson, one of the nation’s most influential Black voices, died peacefully Tuesday morning, his family said in a statement. He was 84.

Jackson, a Baptist minister, had been a civil rights leader since the 1960s, when he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and helped fundraise for the cause.

“Our father was a servant leader — not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” Jackson’s family said.

“His unwavering belief in justice, equality, and love uplifted millions, and we ask you to honor his memory by continuing the fight for the values he lived by.”

The family did not release a cause of death, but Jackson revealed in 2017 that he had the degenerative neurological disease Parkinson’s.

He was hospitalized for observation in November in connection to another neurodegenerative condition, according to media reports.

A dynamic orator and a successful mediator in international disputes, the long-time Baptist minister expanded the space for African Americans on the national stage for more than six decades.

He was the most prominent Black person to run for the US presidency — with two unsuccessful attempts to capture the Democratic Party nomination in the 1980s — until Barack Obama took the office in 2009.

He was present for many consequential moments in the long battle for racial justice in the United States, including with King in Memphis in 1968 when the civil rights leader was slain.

He openly wept in the crowd as Obama celebrated his 2008 presidential election, and he stood with George Floyd’s family in 2021 after a court convicted an ex-police officer of the unarmed Black man’s murder.

Jackson was born Jesse Louis Burns on October 8, 1941, in Greenville, South Carolina, to an unwed teen mother and a former professional boxer.

He later adopted the last name of his stepfather, Charles Jackson.

“I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth. I had a shovel programmed for my hands,” he once said.

He excelled in his segregated high school and earned a football scholarship to the University of Illinois, but later transferred to the predominantly Black Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina, where he received a degree in sociology.

In 1960, he participated in his first sit-in, in Greenville, and then joined the Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights marches in 1965, where he caught King’s attention.

Jackson later emerged as a mediator and envoy on several notable international fronts.

He became a prominent advocate for ending apartheid in South Africa, and in the 1990s served as presidential special envoy for Africa for Bill Clinton.

Missions to free US prisoners took him to Syria, Iraq, and Serbia.

He founded the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization focused on social justice and political activism, in 1996

He is survived by his wife and six children. (Channels)