Hunter Biden is on a media tour of sorts and dropping new details about the waning days of his father’s reelection bid and presidency almost as frequently as he is dropping f-bombs.
The former first son sat down with YouTuber Andrew Callaghan and former Democratic National Committee chair Jaime Harrison in interviews that dropped this week, and they have led to no shortage of headlines. Among them? What he believes was really behind George Clooney’s infamous New York Times op-ed in the aftermath of then-President Biden’s disastrous debate performance.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by Emily Jashinsky, host of MK Media’s After Party with Emily Jashinsky, to discuss Hunter’s take on Clooney and what makes these revelations so interesting.
Clooney Bashes Biden
Clooney was one of the first major voices to call for President Biden to step aside and end his 2024 re-election campaign following the June 2024 CNN presidential debate, which included garbled, halting speech, mental freezes, confused stares, and slack jaw from the then-81 year old (for what it’s worth, the younger Biden told Callaghan that Ambien sleeping pills were to blame).
Less than a month after co-hosting a glitzy fundraiser that brought in some $30 million for Biden’s re-election campaign, Clooney called for him to go in the Times. “It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fund-raiser was not the Joe ‘big F-ing deal’ Biden of 2010,” he wrote. “He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate.”
In their book Original Sin, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thomspon reported that Clooney came to that realization and “was shaken to his core” after Biden, whom he had known for many years, allegedly failed to recognize him during a receiving line at the fundraiser.
Many believed that interaction is what led Clooney to write the opinion piece, but a former Biden campaign official who witnessed the exchange pushed back on the authors’ scoop after it was first reported in The New Yorker in May, saying “that moment didn’t exist.”
Biden Bashes Clooney
And now Hunter is offering an alternative theory for why Clooney may have had an axe to grind. He told Harrison that the actor was annoyed with his father for not publicly recognizing International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes in Gaza. His wife, human rights attorney Amal Clooney, reportedly played a key role in the decision to bring charges against the pair.
“George Clooney, before that event… threatened to pull out of the event how many times? Five, six times, over and over again, saying he was so upset because my dad refused to recognize the arrest warrant for Netanyahu and would not commit to not allowing Netanyahu to enter the country after the ICC warrant went out for his arrest,” Hunter recalled. “And the reason… as if we were supposed to know this, is because his wife was one of the principal architects of that warrant.”
He said the receiving line Tapper and Thompson wrote about featured nothing out of the ordinary. “Any time they’re doing these pictures, as you know, there’s somebody standing next to the president saying, ‘Mr. President, George Clooney’… not because my dad didn’t know who George Clooney was,” Hunter noted. “Literally, I was whispering in his ear saying, ‘Dad, f-ck him.'”
In Hunter’s view, Clooney was looking for an excuse. “He claims, in his arrogance, that my dad, the president of the United States, didn’t know who the actor was,” he told Harrison. “To say something wanted to say something that is so patently untrue in order to justify what you did afterwards is cowardly, is weak.”
The former first son offered a much blunter take on Clooney during his interview with Callaghan. “F-ck him,” he said. “F-ck him and everybody around him. I don’t have to be f-cking nice.” He added that he agrees “with Quentin Tarantino” that “f-cking George Clooney is not a f-cking actor” but rather “a brand.”
Why It’s Interesting
As Megyn explained, Hunter’s version of the story makes a compelling case that Clooney “had a motive to lie,” and she believes it could have served as an interesting counterpoint at the time. “Honestly, it would have been valuable for Hunter to come out before now,” she said. “I don’t think he could have saved his father, but it is very interesting to hear him. He is obviously a smart man… You can hear him putting his thoughts together in a persuasive way.”
Jashinsky agreed. “It’s a completely different story [than Tapper and Thompson’s], and it’s one that is super newsy because it also… involves the president of the United States being threatened by a donor and Hollywood celebrity over this arrest warrant for, ostensibly, an ally of the United States of America, somebody who Biden was aligning himself with,” she noted. “So, it is a much more interesting story… this way, and it makes me wonder who the source is in the Tapper book because it now sounds like it probably came from Clooney.”
Hunter has spared virtually no one in the upper echelons of the Democratic Party or the media in these interviews, and Jashinsky said his approach could actually make him a unique voice on the left. “What Hunter Biden is doing there is attacking the Democratic establishment,” she noted. “And even though he is wrong about, like, 90 percent of the stuff that came out of his mouth, he is believable in his sentiments and he comes across as authentically angry.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Jashinsky by tuning in to episode 1,113 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.