On both Friday and Saturday nights, George and Amal Clooney hosted fundraising dinners for Hillary Clinton with ticket prices that raised the ire of Bernie Sanders supporters. But while George Clooney admits that he actually hates having to raise money like that, he says his efforts are vastly different from the kind of corruption Sanders decries.
"It is an obscene amount of money," Clooney told Meet the Press host Chuck Todd in a pre-taped interview. "The Sanders campaign, when they talk about it, is absolutely right. It's ridiculous that we should have this kind of money in politics. I agree completely."
Those "obscene" amounts, according to Politico, included a $353,400 price for a couple to sit at the head table with the Clooneys in San Francisco on Friday night and $33,400 per person for Saturday night's dinner at the Clooneys' Los Angeles home. Protesters were wrong, however, to lump attendees with the likes of Republican benefactors the Koch brothers, Clooney said.
"The overwhelming amount of money that we're raising, and it is a lot, but the overwhelming amount of the money that we're raising, is not going to Hillary to run for president, it's going to the down-ticket," he explained, adding that one of the end goals would be to nominate a Supreme Court justice who could then overturn Citizens United, thereby making these massive campaign contributions illegal again. "I think there is a difference between the Koch brothers and us, you know? The difference is if I succeed, if we succeed in electing an entire Congress which would be quite a success but a senate and a president, you know, the tax policies that they would enact would probably cost us a lot more money, quite honestly."
Clooney said he likes Sanders and a lot of what the Vermont senator has said during his campaign, but his support of Clinton goes back to her tenure as secretary of state. The actor was very involved in trying to bring peace to Sudan, and he said Clinton "understood the issues even though we don't have any great reason to pay much attention to Sudan. We don't trade with them. We don't get money from them. I found her to be knowledgeable and...to care about the issues. And we've worked together since then, and I've been a very big fan of hers."
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