George Clooney endorses Harris after calling for Biden’s exit
CNN
Actor George Clooney on Tuesday endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, hailing her “historic” White House bid following President Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 presidential race.
Actor George Clooney on Tuesday endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, hailing her “historic” White House bid following President Joe Biden’s exit from the 2024 presidential race. Clooney is seen by many Democratic backers in Hollywood as a sort of compass given his engagement and activism. When he penned a New York Times op-ed earlier this month calling for the president to not seek reelection in the wake of his disastrous debate performance, it was one of several watershed moments in a movement that ultimately ended with Biden’s decision on Sunday to exit the race. “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,” Clooney said in a statement to CNN on Tuesday. Before his op-ed, Clooney’s standing with Biden had helped rally wider donor and celebrity support, even among some who had never been big Biden fans and were not enthused about backing him long before the debate. The June fundraiser he headlined raised $28 million for Biden’s reelection campaign, the most for the Democratic Party from a single event in history. So when he wrote that the Biden he saw during the fundraiser, which also included former President Barack Obama, “was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020,” it was a startling admission from a leading Democratic booster and someone who has interacted with Biden privately that, in his view, the president was unfit to serve to another term. “He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” Clooney added in his op-ed, referencing Biden’s faltering performance at the June 27 presidential debate on CNN.
FBI says it has disrupted major Chinese hacking operation that threatened US critical infrastructure
The FBI has used a court order to seize control of a network of hundreds of thousands of hacked internet routers and other devices that Chinese government-linked hackers were using to threaten critical infrastructure in the US and overseas, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday.
The Federal Reserve is preparing to cut interest rates for the first time in the Biden era after the White House spent the last three years grappling with Americans’ dissatisfaction with the cost of living, raising new questions about the health of the economy and the impact on voters at the ballot box.
Israeli officials notified the US that the country was going to carry out an operation in Lebanon on Tuesday but did not give any details about what they were planning, according to three sources familiar with the matter, including in a call between Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant early Tuesday morning.