Biden didn’t recognize George Clooney at 2024 fundraiser, new book says

U.S. President Joe Biden listens during a campaign event at the Peacock Theater in June 2024, in Los Angeles. (Alex Brandon/AP via CNN Newsource)

Former U.S. president Joe Biden did not recognize George Clooney when he arrived for a record-breaking June 2024 fundraiser the movie star was co-hosting, according to a forthcoming book from CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson.

Backstage before the fundraiser, Clooney greeted the president when he arrived after a three-day trip to Italy for the G7 conference. The president appeared “severely diminished, as if he’d aged a decade since Clooney last saw him in December 2022,” the authors write in an excerpt of the book published in the New Yorker on Tuesday:

“You know George,” the assisting aide told the president, gently reminding him who was in front of him.

“Yeah, yeah,” the president said to one of the most recognizable men in the world, the host of this lucrative fundraiser. “Thank you for being here.”

“It seemed clear that the President had not recognized Clooney,” Tapper and Thompson write.

The excerpt was published from Tapper and Thompson’s new book, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” which will be released on May 20. The book is based on more than 200 interviews, mostly with Democratic insiders, almost all of which occurred after the 2024 election.

Biden’s apparent inability to recognize Clooney was one of the starkest signs of his physical and mental decline in the final year of his presidency, which led to his decision to drop his reelection bid after a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump in June.

“It wasn’t a straight line of decline; he had good days and bad. But until the last day of his presidency, Biden and those in his innermost circle refused to admit the reality that his energy, cognitive skills, and communication capacity had faltered significantly. Even worse, through various means, they tried to hide it,” the authors write.

The Clooney fundraiser took place on June 15, less than two weeks before the debate. Clooney was “shaken to his core” by the interaction with a man he’d known for years, Tapper and Thompson report.

“It was not okay,” recalled a Hollywood VIP who witnessed the interaction, according to the excerpt. “That thing, the moment where you recognize someone you know—especially a famous person who’s doing a f**king fundraiser for you—it was delayed. It was uncomfortable.”

The interaction helps explain the motivation for Clooney to release an op-ed less than a month later calling on Biden to drop out of the race.

The actor had been shocked by a letter Biden released on July 8 insisting he was staying in the race. He reached out to former President Barack Obama to tell him he was considering writing the op-ed, the authors write.

“Obama advised that doing so would only make Biden dig in his heels deeper,” according to the excerpt.

After Clooney wrote a draft, he shared it with Jeffrey Katzenberg, a major Democratic donor who organized the June fundraiser, and told Katzenberg to share it with Biden’s longtime aide, Steve Ricchetti, the authors write.

“Ricchetti read it and was furious,” Tapper and Thompson report. “Internally, he threatened to shut Clooney down — some of his colleagues thought he sounded like a Mob boss.”

According to the excerpt, Katzenberg told Clooney he did not agree with his assessment of Biden, because the president had been jet-lagged the night of the event. He told Clooney he was skeptical the op-ed would have its desired effect. Katzenberg wanted Clooney to cut the line about the befogged Biden at the fundraiser being “the same man we all witnessed at the debate.” He argued that what Clooney was saying was not fair.

“You’re right, it’s not fair, Clooney agreed. Aging was awful. It really wasn’t fair,” the authors write. “But, Clooney said, what he had written was accurate.”

Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, defended his performance as president in a joint interview on ABC’s “The View” earlier this month, pushing back on suggestions he experienced cognitive decline in his final year in office.

“The people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us, and they didn’t see how hard Joe worked every single day,” Jill Biden said. “I mean, he’d get up, he put in a full day, and then at night he would, I’d be in bed, you know, reading my book, and he was still on the phone, reading his briefings, working with staff. I mean, it was nonstop.”

The book excerpt includes details of other Democratic concerns raised about Biden’s health ahead of the June debate. The same night of the Clooney fundraiser, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was discussing his concerns about the debate at a wedding.

“Another wedding guest, who sat at Schumer’s table, recalled him saying, ‘If things go south at the debate, me, Barack, Nancy, and Hakeem have a Plan B,’ though Schumer later would deny it,” the authors write.

“We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” David Plouffe, a former top Obama campaign aide who helped run Kamala Harris’ campaign after Biden dropped out, told Tapper and Thompson.

“And it’s all Biden,” Plouffe said. By deciding to run for reelection and then waiting more than three weeks after the debate to bow out, Plouffe added: “He totally f**ked us.”