Giuliani vows to sue Tucker Carlson over Netanyahu agent claim

Rudy Giuliani said he intends to sue Tucker Carlson for defamation, accusing the broadcaster of suggesting during a recent interview with Hunter Biden that Giuliani had acted as an agent for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when the Hunter Biden laptop story emerged in 2020.

The former New York City mayor made the threat on Newsmax on Sunday, August 23. He had been asked to react to comments Hunter Biden made on Bill Maher's 'Real Time' about Netanyahu's influence over President Donald Trump, but he quickly redirected his answer to Carlson's own conversation with Biden, published on August 10.

That conversation reopened the 2020 controversy over material from a laptop said to belong to the former president's son. Giuliani gave a copy of the hard drive to the New York Post, which published portions of it weeks before the presidential election and made it the basis for a wave of stories about the Biden family.

What Giuliani is claiming

Giuliani accused both Biden and Carlson of treating as settled the idea that he and Trump were working on Netanyahu's behalf when the laptop material surfaced. He denied any such arrangement, saying his loyalty had been to himself, to the United States and to the client he was representing at the time, and he said the accusation had been disproven repeatedly.

Asked by the Newsmax host whether he would actually file suit, Giuliani answered, 'Absolutely.'

He also questioned Carlson's motives. The broadcaster spent years at Fox News promoting the laptop story and criticizing the Bidens, and Giuliani said he did not know what had happened to him. The two had been on the same side of that fight for years before the split now on display.

Giuliani did not say when he would file, in which court, or which of Carlson's specific statements he considered defamatory.

The laptop at the center

The dispute traces to October 14, 2020. The New York Post published stories drawn from a hard drive it said came from a laptop Hunter Biden had abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. The reporting described drug use and other personal material, and Twitter blocked users from sharing the link while Facebook reduced its distribution.

Giuliani, then Trump's personal attorney, supplied the Post with the copy of the drive, and his role made him a central figure in the episode. The provenance of the material has been contested since it first appeared, and the Carlson interview turned that old argument into a personal one.

In the interview with Carlson, Hunter Biden disputed parts of that account. He said material later attributed to the laptop came from several sources, including hacked cloud accounts, and questioned whether he had ever dropped off a computer at the Delaware shop run by John Paul Mac Isaac, whose account has anchored the original story for years.

He can go to hell! I wasn't an agent for anybody but myself and the United States of America and the man I was representing. That's been proven 40 times over. I'm gonna sue him!

When Biden raised doubts about the repair-shop story, Carlson said that account had always been 'the weak part of the story.' Giuliani, who has long relied on that account, described the exchange as Carlson handling his guest gently, saying the host had virtually held Biden on his lap rather than pressing him.

A friendship with Netanyahu

The accusation that angered Giuliani most was the suggestion that he served a foreign leader rather than an American client. He has openly described Netanyahu as a personal friend of 25 years and once told Fox News host Sean Hannity that he would never travel to Israel without spending two hours with him, a relationship he has never hidden.

That history, Giuliani argues, does not mean he acted on the Israeli government's behalf in pushing the laptop material into public view, and he says Carlson and Biden distorted it.

During the interview, Carlson said people connected to the Israeli government had approached him while he was at Fox News and pushed the claim that the drive contained abusive material involving minors. He offered no evidence for that account, and said he had not repeated the claim on air himself. He made the point after Biden accused Giuliani of spreading the same false narrative about him.

Biden made a similar argument, saying Giuliani had defamed him by circulating the same claim about images of minors. Both men were sharply critical of Netanyahu and of Israel's military strikes in Gaza during the interview, and Biden at one point called the prime minister 'evil incarnate.'

Former allies now at odds

The confrontation marks a break between two figures who once pushed the same narrative. Before leaving Fox News, Carlson was among the loudest voices promoting the laptop story and attacking how the mainstream press had handled it, and Giuliani was the person who put the material in front of a newsroom in the first place.

The two had appeared together on Carlson's Fox program to defend the investigation of the Bidens, with Giuliani a regular guest and Carlson a promoter of his findings. The interview with the younger Biden placed them on opposite sides of a fight they had spent years waging together.

The interview drew wide attention in Israeli media. The Jerusalem Post described Carlson, one of the most prominent voices on the American right, and Biden, long one of that movement's favorite targets, bonding over a shared antagonist in Netanyahu and, to a large extent, Israel itself.

Inside the Carlson interview

Carlson's interview with Hunter Biden ran earlier this month and covered his drug addiction and the laptop that became a political weapon against his family.

The allegation that there was abuse of minors on the laptop? That came from the Israelis.

Carlson said an Israeli figure connected to Netanyahu had brought those allegations to him and to Fox News. Biden used the interview to press a broader theory involving Giuliani, Ukraine, Russia and Israel, claiming Giuliani had been seeking damaging material about him well before the Delaware repair shop ever became part of the public story.

The sit-down was one stop in an unusual run of interviews by Hunter Biden. Three days earlier, in a BBC interview on August 7, he said his father's cancer had spread to his bones, an account that came from him rather than from Joe Biden's office. It was part of a stretch of public appearances by a man who for years avoided the press.

Whether a suit follows

Biden has pushed back on other fronts before. In February 2023 his lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Fox News over a report on rent payments, and referred Giuliani and others to the Justice Department over the handling of the laptop data.

The New York Times removed the word unsubstantiated from its laptop coverage in September 2021, in a revision it made without a correction or an editor's note.

Defamation suits brought by public figures are difficult to win, and Giuliani's threat so far rests on his own reading of what the interview implied rather than on a filed complaint. He has repeated that the claim about Netanyahu is false and, in his telling, has already been proven wrong many times, and he has cast Carlson's change of position as a betrayal.

Neither Carlson nor Biden has responded publicly to the threat. Until a complaint is filed, the matter remains what Giuliani stated on Newsmax, a promise to take a former ally to court over the word agent.