
Hunter Biden slams Clooney on anniversary of father's campaign exit
'Fuck him. And everybody around him,' Biden's younger son said in a profanity-laced interview with independent journalist Andrew Callaghan, who has 3 million followers on YouTube.
'Really, do you think in middle America, that voter in Green Bay, Wisconsin, gives a shit what George Clooney thinks about who she should vote for?' Biden also said in a podcast with Jaime Harrison, former chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Clooney was one of the first high-profile Democrats to publicly call on Joe Biden to withdraw from the presidential race, just three months before the election.
Biden, then 81 years old, was at the time facing growing doubts in his own camp about his health and mental acuity, after a disastrous debate with Donald Trump at the end of the June.
'I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee,' read the headline for Clooney's essay, published in the New York Times on July 10, 2024. The Oscar-winning actor and producer recounted having seen the president at a Hollywood fundraiser the month prior, describing him as no longer the politician he was in 2010 or 2020.
'I consider him a friend, and I believe in him...In the last four years, he's won many of the battles he's faced,' Clooney wrote.
'But the one battle he cannot win is the fight against time.'
Less than two weeks later, on July 21, the president announced he was quitting the race.
In the interviews released on Monday, Hunter Biden angrily remembered the events leading to the end of his father's decades-long political career.
'Why do I have to f***ing listen to you? What right do you have to step on a man who's given 52 years of his f***ing 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 f***ing New York Times?' he said in the Callaghan interview.
Plagued for years with legal troubles and drug addiction, Hunter Biden became a favorite target of Republicans, who viewed him as the president's Achilles Heel.
Hunter received an unconditional pardon from his father in December 2024, after Trump defeated the Democratic replacement candidate, vice president Kamala Harris.
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He'd gotten into performing accidentally when he began to compose songs in the early 1950s to amuse his friends. Soon he was performing them at coffeehouses around Cambridge, Massachusetts, while he remained at Harvard to teach and obtain a master's degree in math. He cut his first record in 1953, Songs by Tom Lehrer, which included 'I Wanna Go Back to Dixie,' lampooning the attitudes of the Old South, and 'Fight Fiercely, Harvard,' suggesting how a prissy Harvard blueblood might sing a football fight song. After a two-year stint in the Army, Lehrer began to perform concerts of his material in venues around the world. In 1959, he released another LP called More of Tom Lehrer and a live recording called An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, nominated for a Grammy for best comedy performance (musical) in 1960. But around the same time, he largely quit touring and returned to teaching math, though he did some writing and performing on the side. 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