Actor George Clooney wrote a fundraising email on Saturday urging donations to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign, just days after a report from The Washington Post stated that the filmmaker called a top White House aide to complain about the president's criticism of the International Criminal Court's (ICC) arrest warrants against Israeli leaders.
Clooney's Saturday email, which ran with the subject line, "This is serious," described the upcoming election as a "battle for the soul of our nation," and called for donations to "make sure President Biden and Vice President Harris get four more years in the White House."
According to three sources familiar with the conversation, Clooney called Steve Ricchetti, a counselor to Biden, last month to express concern about the president's denunciation of the ICC's warrants and the administration's initial openness to sanctions against the court as they could impact his wife Amal Clooney, the Post reported.
Amal Clooney, an international human rights lawyer, served as one of six experts on an ICC panel reviewing evidence that led chief prosecutor Karim Khan to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, among others on May 20.
The warrants alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Biden immediately issued a statement, calling the arrest warrants against Israeli leaders "outrageous."
On October 7, 2023, Hamas, a Palestinian militant group, attacked Israel, taking around 250 hostages and killing some 1,200 people. Since then, Israel has launched ground and air offensives into the enclave, with nearly 2 million Palestinians displaced and over 36,700 killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, a department within the Hamas-controlled government.
In a statement on Clooney Center for Justice, the couple's charity, Amal wrote last month, "I served on this Panel because I believe in the rule of law and the need to protect civilian lives," adding that "I will never accept that one child's life has less value than another's. I do not accept that any conflict should be beyond the reach of the law, nor that any perpetrator should be above the law."
In his Saturday morning campaign email, George Clooney described the choice of a Donald Trump presidency or a Biden one as "a choice between those who want to pull America back to the past, and those who want to move American into the future."
Newsweek has reached out to George Clooney's publicist, Clooney Foundation for Justice, and Biden's campaign team for comment via email Saturday afternoon.
The race between the former president and current president, the same 2020 matchup, remains very tight, with FiveThirtyEight's national poll aggregator showing Trump leading Biden by 1.1 points on Saturday. The two candidates are slated for their first presidential debate on June 27, with another scheduled in September.
George Clooney is expected to be at the Biden-Harris June 15 fundraising in Los Angeles, which will also feature actress Julia Roberts and former President Barack Obama.
In his Saturday morning campaign email, the actor urged readers to partake in a lottery system for a meet-and-greet, writing: "Pitch in $25 for the first time today and you'll be automatically entered for a chance to meet myself, Julia Roberts, President Biden, and President Obama."
According to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan, independent research group that tracks money in U.S. politics, George Clooney has not donated to the Biden-Harris campaign since the last election in 2020.
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Mandy Taheri is a Newsweek reporter based in Connecticut and Brooklyn. She joined Newsweek as a reporter in 2024. She ... Read more
