George Clooney joins $28m Hollywood fundraiser for Biden following White House spat over Amal’s work

George Clooney appears to have mended fences with President Joe Biden as he and fellow A-lister Julia Roberts joined a star-studded Hollywood fundraising gala on Saturday night which raised $28million.

The event, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, was held at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles, with room for 7,100. Kimmel moderated a discussion with Biden and former president Barack Obama, where the three took turns blasting Biden’s presumed 2024 opponent, Donald Trump.

Clooney’s attendance came after he called the White House earlier this month to rebuke Biden for his reaction to an International Criminal Court announcement that it would seek arrest warrants for both Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas’ leadership over the brutal devastation of Gaza. Clooney is married to Amal Clooney, an international human rights attorney, who served on a panel of experts which agreed to recommend filing the arrest warrants.

The glitzy event was a rare moment in which Obama took the opportunity to firmly lay out the case against his Trump.

“Look, part of what has happened in the last several years is we’ve normalized behavior that used to be disqualified,” said the former Democratic president. “The other spectacle of the nominee of one of the two major parties is sitting in court and being convicted by a jury of his peers on 34 counts. You have his foundation, it’s not allowed to operate because it was engaging in monkey business and not actually philanthropic. You had this organization being prosecuted for not paying taxes.”

He added: “There was a time when we had certain core values that we agreed with. We believed in basic honesty. We believed in paying your taxes. We believed in making sure that we didn’t make fun of [prisoners of