Hunter Biden has given a profanity-laced, three-hour interview to the US outlet Channel 5 that is remarkable for its no-holds attack on actor George Clooney, denial that he was the source of cocaine found in the White House and thoughts on why his father bombed in his debate with Donald Trump before dropping out of his presidential re-election run.
“Fuck him!” the younger Biden said of Clooney, whose remarkable New York Times opinion piece last July called on the Democratic party for which the actor is a financial donor to find a new presidential nominee.
“Fuck him and everybody around him. I don’t have to be fucking nice.”
Referring to comments from the well-known film director that Clooney is not a “movie star”, Biden continued: “I agree with Quentin Tarantino. Fucking George Clooney is not a fucking actor. He is fucking like … I don’t know what he is. He’s a brand.”
Biden questioned why anyone had to listen to Clooney despite his friendship with Barack Obama, a former Democratic president, and his “really great place in Lake Como”.
“What do you have to do with fucking anything?” Biden said, speaking rhetorically about Clooney. “What right do you have to step on a man who’s given … his fucking life to the service of this country and decide that you, George Clooney, are going to take out basically a full page ad in the fucking New York Times.”
Hunter Biden shared with the Channel 5 outlet his belief that Clooney was upset at Joe Biden, 82, because the former president had criticized the international criminal court (ICC)’s decision to obtain an arrest warrant for the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, on war crime charges. The human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who is married to the actor, was one of the legal experts who recommended that the ICC seek that warrant.
“He was bitching to the White House staff, the senior staff that he was so angry that the president would criticize the arrest warrant,” Hunter Biden said. “He was very, very angry that my dad did not pay homage to her or something.”
Biden’s interview to Channel 5, a popular YouTube channel created by Andrew Callaghan, comes as US House Republicans pursue investigations into his father’s presidency. Congressional Republicans have been claiming that the former president’s closest advisers covered up a physical and mental decline during his presidency, and criticizing his pre-emptive pardons of family members, including Hunter, after Trump threatened to prosecute his opponents as he captured the Oval Office again in November.
“It’s good to see that Hunter has taken some time to process the election, look inward, and hold himself accountable for how his family’s insular, dare I say arrogant at times, approach to politics led to this catastrophic outcome we’re all now living with,” said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama White House official, posted on Twitter/X.
Hunter Biden acknowledged that Joe Biden had an “absolutely horrible” debate against Trump before his father dropped out of the 2024 presidential race exactly a year ago on Monday and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to succeed him. Hunter Biden said his father had to drop out or see fellow Democrats fight him “every step of the way”.
Among the reasons for the poor debate performance were that his father – 81 at the time – was “tired as shit”, Hunter Biden said. “They give him Ambien to be able to sleep. He gets up on the stage and looks like he’s a deer in the headlights, and it feeds into every fucking story that anybody wants to tell.”
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After Trump’s second presidency began in January, the FBI reopened an investigation into who left cocaine in a White House locker in 2023. Suspicions have fallen on Hunter Biden, whose past struggles with substance abuse have been well documented.
But Hunter Biden denied the cocaine found in the White House was his, asserting he has been clean and sober since June 2019. “Why would I bring cocaine into the White House and stick it into a cubby outside … the situation room in the West Wing?” he asked.
The 55-year-old’s Channel 5 interview comes weeks after his father embarked on a series of interviews, including with the New York Times, aimed at convincing the public that Harris’s loss to Trump in 2024 was not his fault.
Asked about his business dealings, which resulted in federal tax evasion charges and illegal handgun possession that were later vacated by his father’s pardon, Biden pointed to his work as a board member at the national rail network Amtrak and the US-UN World Food Program.
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