Clooney defends op-ed calling for Biden to exit race: ‘It was a civic duty’

George Clooney says he considers his New York Times op-ed calling for then-President Biden to exit the 2024 presidential race a “civic duty.”

“I don’t know if it was brave,” the “Ocean’s Eleven” actor told Jake Tapper when the CNN anchor described Clooney’s opinion piece as something some in the public might call courageous.

“It was a civic duty,” Clooney said in a preview clip from the interview airing Wednesday on “The Lead.”

“Because I found that people on my side of the street — I’m a Democrat … in Kentucky, so I get it — when I saw people on my side of the street not telling the truth, I thought that was time,” Clooney said.

Clooney, one of Hollywood’s most prominent Democratic supporters, who hosted a fundraiser for Biden weeks earlier, penned the New York Times piece last July urging the then-commander in chief to drop out of the presidential race.

“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 wasn’t even the Joe Biden of 2020,” Clooney wrote at the time.

Biden withdrew from the race in late July, amid mounting calls from Democratic lawmakers and donors for him to step aside.

Asked by Tapper if people were “still mad” at him because of the op-ed, Clooney replied, “Some people, sure. It’s OK.”

“The idea of freedom of speech, the specific idea of it is, you can’t demand freedom of speech and then say, ‘But don’t say bad things about me,'” said Clooney, 63, who plays journalist Edward R. Murrow in the Broadway play “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

“That’s the deal. You have to take a stand. If you believe in it, take a stand, stand for it and deal with the consequences. That’s the rules,” the Academy Award winner continued.

“So when people criticize me — they criticized me because of my stance against the war 20 years ago, and some people picketed my movies, and they put me on a deck of cards — and I have to take that. That’s fair. I’m OK with that,” Clooney said.

“I’m OK with criticism for where I stand. I defend their right to criticize me as much as I defend my right to criticize them,” he said.

Clooney’s comments about the op-ed came on the heels of a “60 Minutes” interview last month in which he was asked whether he was “happy” he wrote it.

“I’ll make it kind of easy: I was raised to tell the truth,” Clooney told CBS’s Jon Wertheim. 

“I had seen the president up close for this fundraiser, and I was surprised,” he said.

“And so I feel as if there was a lot of profiles in cowardice in my party through all of that, and I was not proud of that, and I also believed I had to tell the truth.”