Former U.S. Rep. Eliot Engel, a New York Democrat who chaired the Foreign Affairs Committee and played an influential role in matters from the Balkans to the Beltway, including President Donald Trump’s first impeachment, has died. He was 79.
Engel died Friday at a Bronx hospital of complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to his family.
“During his over 44 years in public service, Eliot Engel fought tirelessly for his constituents at home and for peace and security around the world,” the family said in a statement.
Engel won his first congressional election in 1988, defeating a 10-term incumbent on an insurgent, reformist platform. More than 30 years later, he left office in similar fashion after losing a 2020 primary to now-former Rep. Jamaal Bowman in a race seen as a progressive upset over the party’s pragmatic wing.
A former teacher and state Assembly member, Engel rose through the ranks of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, eventually becoming its chair in 2019. He was a strong supporter of Israel and one of the first lawmakers to call for military intervention on behalf of Kosovo, then a province where ethnic Albanians were seeking independence from Serbia, in their war in the 1990s. A U.S.-and-U.K.-led NATO bombing campaign opened the way for Kosovo’s eventual independence nine years later.
Engel was “a fierce advocate for Kosovo and the Albanian community at a time when few others were paying attention,” U.S. Rep. Richie Torres, a fellow Bronx Democrat, said in a statement Friday.
Engel also helped negotiate the Harkin–Engel Protocol, an international agreement that aimed to eliminate the “worst forms of child labor” on cocoa farms in West Africa.
And he headed the Foreign Relations Committee as it worked on the 2019-2020 impeachment inquiry into Trump over the Republican’s efforts to prompt Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to scour for dirt on Trump’s then-rival Joe Biden.
After Trump was impeached and then acquitted in February 2020, Engel vowed not to abandon the issue, saying there were “a lot of unanswered questions that the American public deserves to know” answers to.
Soon after, the COVID-19 pandemic set in — and with it, questions, spurred by an article in The Atlantic, about Engel’s absence from his district.
That scrutiny grew following a hot mic incident in which Engel was heard trying to convince another Bronx official to let him speak at a news conference, saying: “If I didn’t have a primary, I wouldn’t care.”
During his years in office, Engel became known for waiting for hours to get an aisle seat in the House chamber for the State of Union address, so he could greet the president — in full view of TV cameras — as the chief executive entered.
But Rep. George Latimer, a Democrat who now holds what was Engel’s seat, said “his legacy consists of hard work on issues and kindness to all.”
