Copyright The Daily Beast
George Clooney has called out Hunter Biden for “outright lies” in his expletive-laden rant trashing Clooney’s role in pushing former President Joe Biden out of the 2024 presidential race. An interview on CBS Sunday Morning gave Clooney the chance to address the comments made by President Biden’s son. Hunter, 55, took aim at Clooney, 64, during an interview on Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan in July, roughly a year after the actor wrote a consequential New York Times op-ed urging Biden not to seek re-election. Clooney—who has previously defended the op-ed as a “civic duty”—fired back in the interview with Sunday Morning’s Seth Doane, saying, “I could spend a lot of time debunking many of the things [Hunter] said because many of the things he said were just outright lies: Obama didn’t put me up to it, it wasn’t my fundraiser—it was my fundraiser, all the things.” “But the reality is I don’t think looking backwards like that is helpful to anyone, particularly to him. I don’t think it’s helpful for the Democratic party, and so I’m just gonna wish him well on his ongoing recovery and I hope he does well and just leave it at that. I have many personal opinions about it, but I don’t find it to be helpful to have a public spat with him.” Hunter had suggested in his explosive July interview that “Obama people” had given Clooney “the blessing” to write the Times op-ed. He had also blasted Clooney’s characterization of a Hollywood fundraiser Clooney co-hosted for Biden in June 2024, where the then-president reportedly didn’t recognize Clooney, a major Democratic fundraiser. Hunter had claimed, “George Clooney wasn’t really the host, he was the entertainment, I guess,” and insisted that his father did recognize the two-time Oscar winner. On Sunday, Clooney again defended his op-ed while calling Biden’s decision to effectively hand then-Vice President Kamala Harris the Democratic nomination after dropping out a “mistake.” “We had a chance. I wanted there to be, as I wrote in the op-ed, a primary. Let’s battle-test this quickly and get it up and going. I think the mistake with it being Kamala is she had to run against her own record and it’s very hard to do if the point of running is to say, ‘I’m not that person,’” Clooney told Doane. “It’s hard to do, and so she was given a very tough task. I think it was a mistake, quite honestly. But, we are where we are.”
