Sanders spoke out calling the fundraisers, which are set to take place in April, “obscene.”
The first is the dinner which is taking place on the 15th in San Francisco, donors who shell up over a third of a million dollars will get to sit at the head table with Clinton, Clooney, and his wife Amal. The second is a $33,400 per person event at the Clooney’s home in Los Angeles the next evening.
“It is obscene that Secretary Clinton keeps going to big-money people to fund her campaign,” Sanders said on political talk show “State of the Union.”
Sanders, whose campaign is primarily funded by small individual donors, noted that while he is a fan of Clooney’s work, these types of events are a big problem in American politics.
“I have a lot of respect for George Clooney. He’s a great actor. I like him,” Sanders said. “But this is the problem with American politics … Big money is dominating our political system. And [my supporters and I] are trying to move as far away from that as we can.”
“So it’s not a criticism of Clooney,” he said. “It’s a criticism of a corrupt campaign finance system, where big money interests — and it’s not Clooney, it’s the people coming to this event — have undue influence on the political process.”
“It’s not only this Clooney event,” Sanders said. “It is the fact she has now raised well over $15 million from Wall Street for her super-PAC, and millions more from the fossil fuel industry, and from the drug companies.”
While Clinton is far ahead of Sanders as far as delegates go, particularly among superdelegates who are not obligated to vote for the same candidate who won their counties, Sanders remains hopeful that wins in delegate-rich states like California will help push him past her as the race continues.
“I think when they begin to look at the reality, and that is that we in poll after poll are beating Donald Trump by much larger margins than is Secretary Clinton, I think their people are going to say to them, look, why don’t you support the people of our state, vote Bernie Sanders,” Sanders said of the superdelegates.
