Biden didn't recognize Clooney last year, book claims

President Biden didn’t recognize actor George Clooney at a fundraiser in the last month of his 2024 campaign, according to an excerpt of a forthcoming book. 

The passage from “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson, obtained by multiple outlets, revealed two different sides of Biden that Clooney saw, one in December 2022 when he appeared fully fit for the office and another last June when the actor couldn’t believe the president’s seeming decline. 

"The president appeared severely diminished, as if he’d aged a decade since Clooney last saw him in December 2022. He was taking tiny steps and had an aide guiding him by his arm," the authors report. 

As Biden entered the fundraiser, he greeted various guests, but an aide seemed to have to remind him who Clooney was when he began speaking with him. 

“Oh, yeah!” Biden said. “Hi, George!” 

The authors report that Clooney was not the only guest in attendance that evening who was concerned. 

“Other high-dollar attendees who posed for photographs with Obama and Biden described Biden as slow and almost catatonic,” Tapper and Thompson reported. “Though they saw pockets of clarity while watching him on television, and onstage later that night, there were obvious brain freezes and clear signs of a mental slide. It was, to some of them, terrifying.” 

The incident is just one of the details included in the forthcoming book, set to be released next week. The book also mentions Biden aides considering whether the president needed a wheelchair if he were reelected and attempting to shield him from staff members to not reveal his frailties. 

The exchange with Clooney came before Biden’s debate with President Trump a couple weeks later, which triggered a series of events leading to Biden dropping out of the race. Clooney wrote an op-ed calling for Biden to do so about a week and a half before the president yielded to pressure and ended his reelection bid.