“[W]E have to be very careful, very precise. Well funded,” George Clooney and Brad Pitt told Elliot Gould in the 2001 blockbuster Ocean’s Eleven. Clooney as the character Danny Ocean was convincing an investor to bankroll their attempt at robbing a strong mogul blind, leaving him powerless. “You gotta be nuts, too,” the investor, played by Gould, responded. “And you’re gonna need a crew as nuts as you are!”

Ocean’s Eleven (which, due to subject matter, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend) is a work of fiction—a plot too elaborate for anything similar to happen in real life. Right?

“People would ask me, ‘Knowing what you know now, do you wish you had a third term?’” Barack Obama famously told Stephen Colbert in 2020. “And I used to say, if I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or a front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines but somebody else was doing all the talking and ceremony, I would be fine with that ….”

Many, the Trumpet included, took that statement as a small sign of the shadowy influence Obama still wields over Washington. Many have noticed his fingerprints over the decisions made by the Biden administration. Many connect the dots with Obama as “the man in the basement” and Joe Biden as “the front man.” Is it possible there is even someone playing the role of the earpiece?

Perhaps Obama had Clooney’s heist film in mind when putting together his “presidential steal team.” He needed somebody who could act very careful, very precise. Somebody well funded and well connected. Somebody as brazen and bold as he is. An effective middleman who would further muddy the link between Obama and everything happening in the world. A great actor who knows how to charm onlookers.

Perhaps the man he needed was “Danny Ocean” himself. Barack Obama and George Clooney are longtime friends. And especially in the past year, Obama seems to have used his relationship with George and his wife Amal to further his agenda.

Recruitment

Clooney’s relationship with Obama first hit the public spotlight in 2006, when the actor campaigned with then Senator Obama to raise awareness of the crisis in Sudan’s Darfur region. Apparently, that small beginning turned Clooney into an Obama fanboy before he was even president. In 2006, Clooney on an abc interview said Obama was “the most charismatic person I’ve been in a room with in a long time.” That same year, he said an Obama presidential run “would be the most electrifying thing to happen to the Democratic Party since [John F.] Kennedy.”

Obama became president in 2009. Since then, their relationship has only grown, even to the point of influencing policy. Obama was president for barely a month when Clooney spoke with him about the situation in Sudan. Clooney felt confident enough with their relationship to give Obama foreign-policy advice on how to deal with Sudan.

Their relationship goes well beyond merely dealing with one struggling African country. During Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, Clooney opened his Los Angeles residence for a fundraising event that generated $15 million.

Clooney hosted another Obama fundraiser that year—in Geneva, Switzerland. That event earned a more modest $625,000, but taking the time to set up a fundraising event on another continent shows how much Obama’s reelection mattered to Clooney.

A liberal actor fundraising among his own for a Democratic president may not be anything new. One whom the president invites to the White House for foreign-policy advice is a bit stranger. But it’s still not out of the ordinary for one-percenters to associate with each other and share ideas.

Clooney has continued working on projects with Obama years after he left office. This relationship coincides with the Clooney family’s involvement in national and international politics. This is where things get interesting.

Millions

Clooney continued his fundraising activity, earning $7 million with animation mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg on a virtual fundraiser for Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. Four years later, on June 15 of this year, Clooney and Obama held a joint fundraiser at Los Angeles’s Peacock Theater. Along with an ensemble of visitors that included Julia Roberts, Jimmy Kimmel and Barbara Streisand, Clooney and Obama helped raise over $30 million for Biden, a record for a Democratic candidate.

Biden has basically been a surrogate in the White House, allowing Obama to continue his policies post-presidency. And Clooney is helping Obama do it, even if in a relatively small way, through his fundraising. That the two of them often appear together for these events suggests regular coordination.

Clooney and Obama are cooperating in the private sphere as well. In 2023, Amal Clooney, Michelle Obama and Melinda French Gates (ex-wife of Bill Gates) announced a joint program between their three foundations to end child marriage. Nothing is wrong with trying to end child marriage, but it shows the two families are still working together.

George Clooney has close ties to the Democratic Party, so it’s not surprising he is helping out his own. What is concerning is that, in at least one very public example, he has involved himself in a major foreign affairs issue. The link is through his wife, Amal.

Outlaws

International Criminal Court (icc) prosecutor Karim Khan announced May 20 that he was applying for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on war crimes. The icc usually doesn’t indict sitting heads of government. Normally, only exceptionally egregious cases, like Sudan’s Omar Bashir (for the genocide in Darfur) and Russia’s Vladimir Putin (for the mass kidnapping of Ukrainian children) end up on the icc docket. If its judges approve Khan’s requests, it would basically be making moral equivalency between Netanyahu and Putin.

Israel never signed up to the icc and, if the court issues a warrant, it may mean little for Netanyahu for now. But much of the developed world has signed onto the icc, so Netanyahu could be cut off from traveling to most of the Western world.

Khan is the face of the investigation. But he didn’t act alone.

Amal Clooney is a human rights lawyer. By virtue of being married to one of Hollywood’s most famous actors, she is a good candidate for the most high-profile human rights lawyer alive. And Khan specifically requested that she be on the team.

“[W]e believe it is important to publish [our conclusions] given the extent to which discourse has been politicized, disinformation has been rife, and international media has been denied access to the front lines,” Amal Clooney cowrote for the Financial Times. “Ultimately, we hope that this process will contribute to increased protections for civilians and sustainable peace in a region that has already endured too much.”

Netanyahu has been on Obama’s hit list for a long time. Since entering office in 2009, Obama has viewed Netanyahu as the primary obstacle to his vision of an independent Palestinian state. Biden’s marginalization of Israel is a continuation of Obama’s policies.

Amal Clooney was one of five advisers to Khan’s decision. It would be unfair to paint her as the architect of the icc attack at this point. But considering how long her husband has worked with Obama—considering how much he is doing in contribution to the Biden campaign right now—considering how George gave Obama foreign-policy advice on the Middle East before—is it too much of a stretch to suggest Amal could have served as a link between the icc and Obama?

The Biden administration has condemned the icc’s decision. But according to anonymous European sources who spoke to the Wall Street Journal, the U.S. heard of the warrant application ahead of time but “didn’t want to intervene to pressure the icc over its decisions.”

About a week before the June 15 fundraiser, George phoned presidential counselor Steve Ricchetti expressing his concern about Biden’s position on the icc. According to sources who spoke to the Washington Post, “The actor was … upset about the administration’s initial openness to imposing sanctions on the icc because his wife might be subject to the penalties.”

“His concerns spread throughout Biden’s orbit,” the Post continued, “leaving some officials to worry that the high-profile actor would withdraw from participating in the marquee fundraiser.”

A week later, Biden was at the fundraiser with Clooney and Obama to get his $30 million—even skipping a Ukraine peace summit to attend it. And so far, the U.S. government has done nothing against the icc.

Mastermind

It’s an open secret that the current U.S. government is not led by Joe Biden. More and more people are connecting the dots that lead to Barack Obama.

But it’s not just America impacted by this. As the world’s superpower, anything that happens in America usually affects the rest of the world. In this case, it’s not just the U.S. that the Obama-Biden complex has in its sights. It’s also the State of Israel. In the Clooneys’ case, Obama isn’t afraid to use seemingly roundabout methods to undermine Israel.

“The Obama administration demonstrated in many ways that it dislikes the Jews,” Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry writes in America Under Attack. “Israeli leaders recognized this. They must have asked why that administration harbored such antipathy for them. They don’t understand—and even the people who have that bitter feeling toward them often don’t understand why their own hatred is so deep.”

This goes beyond one powerful individual having a chip on his shoulder. There are deeper, spiritual reasons why Israel is under attack.

To learn what they are, order a free copy of America Under Attack.