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BALTIMORE (AP) — Congressman and civil rights champion Elijah Cummings is set to receive a final farewell in his beloved Baltimore.
Former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are among the scheduled speakers for the funeral Friday at New Psalmist Baptist Church, where Cummings worshipped for nearly four decades.
Bishop Walter S. Thomas Jr., the church’s pastor, will deliver the eulogy.
Cummings died Oct. 17 at age 68 of complications from longstanding health problems. A son of sharecroppers, he became a lawyer and elected official.
Cummings died at Gilchrist Hospice Care — an affiliate of Johns Hopkins Medicine — October 17, according to the Baltimore Sun. The Maryland Democrat had not returned to the Capitol after undergoing a medical procedure in September, but had remained active in committee work, sending out subpoenas throughout October. The severity of his condition was not public knowledge.
His death comes amid the oversight committee’s impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. The committee has been engaged in a years-long investigation into the Trump administration that escalated in September, amid reports that the Trump administration withheld military aid to Ukrainian to pressure the foreign leaders to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son.
Cummings was the subject of Trump’s ire over the summer; Trump called him a “brutal bully” and derided Cummings’s Baltimore district as the “worst in the USA,” a “rat and rodent infested mess,” and a “dangerous & filthy place.” Upon his death, the president tweeted that Cummings was a “highly respected political leader.”
