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Former President Joe Biden apparently didn't recognize Academy Award winner and Democratic donor George Clooney during the same June 2024 fundraiser in which the actor claims the former president lost his support for a re-election campaign, according to an upcoming book by CNN's Jake Tapper and Axios' Alex Thompson.
An excerpt of Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again was shared by the New Yorker on Tuesday (May 13) and included details on an interaction between the two at a June 2024 fundraiser the actor hosted -- which followed the president's three-day trip to Italy for the G7 conference -- in which Biden appeared to be "severely diminished as if he'd aged a decade since Clooney last saw him in December 2022."
“You know George,” an aide told Biden, according to the book.
"Yeah, yeah," the then-president responded. "Thank you for being here."
"It seemed clear that the President had not recognized Clooney," Tapper and Thompson wrote.
Clooney, 64, had previously revealed that Biden, 82, lost his support during a Los Angeles fundraiser in June 2024, claiming the media failed to cover Biden's fitness and ability to serve, during an interview with the New York Times' Maureen Dowd published on February 20.
"I saw him for hours a year earlier at the Kennedy Center, and I saw someone much less sharp," Clooney told Dowd, who wrote that the actor was "gobsmacked" by the experience.
“I’ve always liked Joe Biden, and I like him still,” he added.
Clooney, a longtime Democratic donor, publicly called for Biden to drop out of the presidential race on July 10, which was 11 days before the president ultimately announced his decision to end his re-election campaign.
“It’s devastating to say it, but the Joe Biden I was with three weeks ago at the fundraiser was not the Joe ‘big F**king deal’ Biden of 2010. He wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020. He was the same man we all witnessed at the debate,” Clooney wrote in a guest essay for the New York Times, referencing the Los Angeles fundraiser at the time.