The Oscar winner also addressed Hunter Biden’s backlash to Clooney’s op-ed asking former President Joe Biden to step down during the 2024 campaign.
George Clooney has no regrets about his New York Times op-ed ahead of the 2024 election calling for then-President Joe Biden to step aside … but he does think former Vice President Kamala Harris running was a “mistake.”
While sitting down with CBS’s Sunday Morning, the Ocean’s Eleven star opened up about his thoughts in hindsight of the 2024 presidential election.
“Yes,” Clooney said definitively when asked if he would write the op-ed again.
“We had a chance. I wanted there to be, as I wrote in the op-ed, a primary,” he continued. “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.'”
Clooney has long been a supporter of Harris, especially after attending a political fundraiser in June 2024 when President Biden was still running. The following month, he published the op-ed expressing concern about Biden’s campaign, explaining that he was “not the Joe ‘big f–king deal’ Biden of 2010” any longer and needed to drop out of the race.
When Biden made the choice to step back, Clooney enthusiastically showed his support for Harris’ decision to run.
“President Biden has shown what true leadership is. He’s saving democracy once again. We’re all so excited to do whatever we can to support Vice President Harris in her historic quest,” he said in a statement at the time.
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The op-ed was met with criticism from Biden’s son, Hunter, who made headlines earlier this year for defending his dad — and directing a “f–k you” at Clooney several time throughout his interview from Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan.
Clooney addressed the backlash from Hunter with Sunday Morning , insisting he had no intention to begin a back-and-forth with Hunter.
“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,” Clooney told the outlet. “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.”
The Oscar-winning actor and producer continued: “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.”
