Hunter Biden on Monday claimed actor George Clooney had threatened to pull out of a Los Angeles fundraiser last summer, an event that was the basis of a New York Times op-ed Clooney later wrote alleging then-President Biden didn’t recognize him.
The claim came as part of a wide-reaching interview Hunter Biden gave to YouTube personality Andrew Callaghan’s web series “Channel 5″ where he also lashed out at Clooney and other members of the Democratic party who publicly criticized the former president after his disastrous debate against President Trump.
Hunter Biden claimed that prior to the LA fundraiser, Clooney had been lashing out at White House staff, confirming reporting from The Washington Post that the actor had expressed his displeasure to the White House about the president’s remarks on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s arrest warrant.
Biden claimed that Clooney’s ire was related to the work of his wife, Amal Clooney, a noted human rights attorney, who was one of the legal experts who recommended that the International Criminal Court seek action against Netanyahu over Israel’s war in Gaza.
The Post had reported that George Clooney called Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden’s closest advisers, to complain, and took particular issue with the president’s deeming of the warrant as “outrageous.”
“He was bitching to the White House staff … he was so angry that the president criticized the arrest warrant that was executed for Netanyahu,” Hunter Biden said.
The president’s son claimed that the actor had gone a step further, threatening to pull out of the major campaign fundraiser as the 2024 campaign was beginning to heat up.
“I saw the text messages that he wrote. Reams of text messages, like, ‘how dare he do that,’” Hunter Biden said. “And he kept promising that he was gonna embarrass the president and pull out of the fundraiser.”
Representatives for George Clooney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In the end, George Clooney did attend the fundraiser headlining the event alongside former President Obama and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel in Los Angeles.
But along with raking in $28 million for the Biden campaign, the marquee event proved fateful in a different way: George Clooney, taken aback at President Biden’s seeming frailty during the event, wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times a month later calling on him to step back from the race.
The actor was among the earlier voices calling for Biden to drop out of the race. Hunter Biden’s interview with Callaghan came on the one-year anniversary of Biden exiting the race.
Hunter Biden laid into George Clooney and other critics of his father during the three-plus hour interview.
“F‑‑‑ing George Clooney is not a f‑‑‑ing actor. He is a f‑‑‑ing, like … I don’t know what he is. He is a brand,” Hunter Biden said in an expletive-laden broadside.
