Dianne Feinstein, a long-serving Democratic U.S. senator from California and gun control advocate who spearheaded the first federal assault weapons ban and documented the CIA's torture of foreign terrorism suspects, has died at 90, U.S. media reported on Friday.
Feinstein's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the news, first reported by the Punchbowl news outlet.
Feinstein said the horror of that experience never left her and she went on to author the federal ban on military-style assault weapons that lasted from 1994 until its 2004 expiration. Health issues slowed Feinstein late in her career, when she was the oldest senator at the time. She announced in February 2023 that she would not seek re-election the following year and was sidelined from Congress for three months ending in May of that year after suffering from shingles and complications including encephalitis and Ramsay Hunt Syndrome.
"History will judge us," Feinstein added, "by our commitment to a just society governed by law and the willingness to face an ugly truth and say, 'Never again.'" The late Arizona Senator John McCain, tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, praised Feinstein's release of the report and said, "Most of all, I know the use of torture compromises what most distinguishes us from our enemies."Feinstein defended U.S. surveillance programs exposed in 2013 by a National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden, a leak she called "an act of treason.
At times, critics on the left felt she was not liberal enough or insufficiently antagonistic toward Republicans. For example, some liberal activists called on her to resign in 2020 after she hugged Republican Senator Lindsey Graham following a Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Republican President Donald Trump's conservative Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
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