George Clooney Co-Authors Op-Ed On Sudan’s Rich Deal With U.S. Lobbying Firm

George Clooney and John Prendergast, co-founders of nonprofit anti-war crimes initiative The Sentry, have penned an op-ed piece for Time magazine about an American company they say is lobbying to remove sanctions on Sudan’s bloody regime. The actor-activist and the professional activist write that K Street law and lobbying firm Squire Patton Boggs signed a deal with the Sudanese government with that goal in mind.

“The firm will be paid $40,000 a month by a government that’s on the U.S. state sponsors of terror list, with a head of state, Omar al-Bashir, wanted for genocide by the International Criminal Court,” the pair wrote.

“Over the last four administrations, Congress has led bipartisan U.S. efforts to isolate the Sudan regime,” they added. “So it’s surprising that Squire Patton Boggs, a firm that includes in its senior ranks former House Speaker John Boehner and former senators Trent Lott and John Breaux, has taken on this account. Given the exemplary service these men have performed for our country, it must mean that they simply don’t know. Either they don’t know that their firm is taking $40,000 a month from the government of Sudan, or they don’t know what this regime has done. … It’s also possible they don’t know that the government of Sudan continues to use starvation as a weapon of war on its own people, still funds militias that murder its own innocent civilians, and continues to loot the country of its natural resources and funnel the wealth of Sudan into the hands of regime leaders through massive corruption.”

Read the full op-ed here.

Clooney and Prendergast founded The Sentry in 2015 as part of the Enough Project. The initiative “seeks to dismantle the networks of perpetrators, facilitators and enablers who fund and profit from Africa’s deadliest conflicts.” Its website also says it hopes to “lend greater support to broader accountability measures as well as provide leverage to peace efforts aimed at ending Africa’s deadliest conflicts.”