Hunter Biden has reacted angrily towards actor George Clooney for questioning his father’s mental sharpness during the 2024 election race – an intervention that led to Joe Biden dropping out.
In an expletive-filled interview with the YouTube outlet Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan, the younger Biden accused Clooney of exaggerating the former president’s frailty.
After meeting Biden at an LA fundraising event last summer, Clooney became one of the first major Democratic figures to call on Joe Biden to drop out of the race.
Less than a fortnight later, the elder Biden announced he would step aside for the eventual Democratic nominee, Vice-President Kamala Harris.
The contest in November was ultimately won by Harris’s opponent, Republican Donald Trump.
Clooney inserted himself into the presidential campaign via a New York Times opinion article in July 2024 headlined “I Love Joe Biden. But We Need a New Nominee“.
The actor expressed support for the president’s agenda but pointed to worries over his disastrous debate against Trump in which he stumbled over his words.
In the interview, the younger Biden blamed it on a gruelling travel schedule and taking the drug Ambien, also known as zolpidem, which is used to treat sleep problems.
“They give him Ambien to be able to sleep. He gets up on the stage and he looks like he’s a deer in the headlights,” he said.
In the New York Times article, Clooney said the meeting with Biden at the charity event showed he was “the same man we all witnessed in the debate”.
He added: “We are not going to win in November with this president.”
More details about the encounter at the fundraiser were revealed in a recent book by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, who reported that the president “appeared severely diminished” and didn’t recognise the actor.
During the interview released Monday, Hunter Biden’s first lengthy comments since the election, the former president’s son denied that account and said Clooney had “attempted to cut the knees out from a sitting president”.
Asked why Clooney intervened in the race, Hunter Biden responded with a succession of profanities about the actor.
“What do you have to do with… anything,” he said in a message directed at Clooney. “Why do I have to… listen to you?”
The younger Biden suggested that Clooney was motivated by disagreement over the former president’s stance towards Israel.
Clooney’s wife Amal was on a legal panel which recommended that the International Criminal Court issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the war in Gaza.
But President Biden rejected the idea, at one point calling the warrant “outrageous“.
The BBC has attempted to contact the Hollywood actor for comment.
Hunter Biden also criticised reports by Tapper and others that he was heavily involved in White House meetings during his father’s final months in office – even after being convicted of felony weapons charges.
“I think I spent 12 days in the White House in the last two years of the administration,” Hunter Biden said.
Before leaving office, Joe Biden pardoned his son, who last year pleaded guilty to tax evasion in addition to being convicted on the weapons charges.
The younger Biden’s business dealings, legal troubles and addiction to alcohol and drugs became an issue during the 2020 presidential campaign, when the contents of a laptop he owned were leaked to the New York Post.
Despite initial questions about its veracity, the leaked material was determined to be authentic, however the fallout did not prevent Joe Biden from defeating Donald Trump in that year’s election.
Speaking to the BBC earlier this year in his first interview since leaving office, Joe Biden said he didn’t regret ending his re-election campaign, but dismissed the idea that quitting earlier might have changed the outcome.
“I don’t think it would have mattered,” he said.
An announcement from Joe Biden in May this year that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer revived questions about his health while serving in the White House.
