During a new appearance on CBS News Sunday Morning with Seth Doane, Jay Kelly star George Clooney said he doesn’t regret penning his op-ed urging Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 presidential election, addressing Hunter Biden‘s rant about his comments and calling Kamala Harris‘s appointment as the Democratic candidate a “mistake.”
When asked by Doane if he would write his New York Times political essay again, Clooney said, “Yes. 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. It’s very hard to do if the point of running is to say, ‘I’m not that person.’ 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. We were gonna lose more House seats, they say. So, I don’t know. To not do it would be to say, ‘I’m not gonna tell the truth.’”
The two-time Oscar winner previously doubled down on his decision earlier this year, telling CNN, “It was a civic duty … That’s the deal, you have to take your stand if you believe in it. Take a stand, stand for it and then deal with the consequences. That’s the rules, so when people criticize me — they criticized me for my stance against the war 20 years ago, people picketed my movies and they put me on a deck of cards — I have to take that, that’s fair. I’m OK with that, I’m OK with criticism for where I stand. I defend their right to criticize me as much as I defend my right to criticize them.”
Elsewhere on Sunday Morning, the Good Night, and Good Luck actor addressed Hunter Biden’s expletive-laden rant about him, which came over the summer during a three-hour Channel 5 sitdown, in which the businessman said, in part: “Fuck you. What do you have to do with fucking anything? Why do I have to fucking listen to you? What right do you have to step on a man who’s given 52 years of his fucking life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full page ad in the fucking New York Times to undermine the president at a time in which, by the way, what do people care about the most? Why do you think that the Republicans have an advantage over us? Because they’re unified.” He also called Clooney “not a fucking actor … he’s a brand.”
Clooney said in response, “I could spend a lot of time debunking many of the things he 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.”
