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.
The CIA has sent the White House an unclassified email listing all new hires that have been with the agency for two years or less in an effort to comply with an executive order to downsize the federal workforce, according to three sources familiar with the matter – a deeply unorthodox move that could potentially expose the identities of those officers to foreign government hackers.
Trump administration officials are hurrying to catch up to the president’s audacious and improbable plan for the United States to take ownership of Gaza and redevelop it into a “Middle Eastern Riviera,” trying to wrap their heads around an idea that some hope might be so outlandish it forces other nations to step in with their own proposals for the Palestinian enclave.