Cassandra Quin Butts, the former Deputy White House Counsel and nominee to the Ambassadorship to the
Bahamas, died suddenly on Thursday. She was 50 years old.
A statement from Butts’ family says that she suffered from a “brief illness” and that she was found by her sister at her Washington, D.C. home.
Butts attended Harvard Law with President Obama and served as his deputy counsel during his first year in office. She left the following year when the president named her to serve as a senior adviser to the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a foreign aid agency.
President Obama’s statement on Ms. Butts:
“To know Cassandra Butts was to know someone who made you want to be better. And Michelle and I were fortunate enough to count her as a friend for most of our adult lives.
Cassandra and I met as law students, and we quickly discovered a shared passion for jazz – and for public service. It was a passion she’d chase for the rest of her life – on Capitol Hill, at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, at the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and as an advisor of mine – but above all, as a citizen, always pushing, always doing her part to advance the causes of opportunity, civil rights, development, and democracy. Cassandra was someone who put her hands squarely on that arc of the moral universe, and never stopped doing whatever she could to bend it towards justice.
We lost her this week, at far too young an age. But along with all her friends and family, we find comfort in the knowledge that all the good she did for so many lives on. She made America better. She made so many lives better, including ours. We admired her so much. And we will miss her deeply.”
