Giuliani Says He Will Sue Tucker Carlson Over Israeli Agent Claim

Rudy Giuliani says he intends to take Tucker Carlson to court. The former New York City mayor said so live on Newsmax on Sunday, August 23, telling viewers he plans to sue Carlson for defamation over a recent interview the podcaster did with Hunter Biden. No case has been filed.

Giuliani's anger centers on a single exchange, and on his own reading of it. In the interview Hunter Biden named several groups he believed had a hand in the laptop's release, among them what he called "the Netanyahu side," while conceding he had no forensic evidence. Carlson's "I agree" came at the end of his own point about material circulating widely once it is out. Giuliani took it as agreement that he and Donald Trump had worked as agents for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and that was enough to send him off the rails on live television.

"He can go to hell!" Giuliani said. "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 the host asked whether he would actually go through with it, Giuliani did not blink. "Absolutely," he said. He also described himself in the same answer as "seriously considering suing him." This is the same laptop story Twitter blocked and Facebook demoted right before the 2020 election, and Giuliani was the man who handed the material over to reporters in the first place.

The moment that lit the fuse

Giuliani was originally on Newsmax to react to a different clip, one of Hunter Biden on Bill Maher's Real Time two days earlier, talking about Netanyahu's pull with Trump. Rudy barely touched it. He pivoted almost instantly to Carlson's sit-down instead.

His own account of the exchange: "Now he's saying, Hunter is, that Bibi Netanyahu set it up and at the conclusion of his saying that, Hunter, either he's the lapdog or Tucker is, Tucker said, 'I agree.' In other words, he agrees that I was and Trump was an agent for Bibi."

Then he went after Carlson directly. "I don't know what has happened to Tucker Carlson," Giuliani said, "but if he's not working for somebody else, he's doing a good imitation of it." He also described the interview's tone in blunt terms, saying Carlson "virtually had Hunter on his lap, feeding him a bottle."

How a laptop from 2020 is still causing fights

To understand why Giuliani is this worked up, go back to October 14, 2020. The New York Post published an email from a hard drive said to belong to Hunter Biden, reporting that he had introduced a Ukrainian businessman to his father. Later stories drew on material about his drug use. Twitter blocked links to the first report and locked the Post's account for 16 days; Facebook limited how far it spread pending a fact-check.

Giuliani was the man who gave the Post a copy of that hard drive, three days before it published. That single act put him at the center of the saga and has kept him there ever since. He was Trump's personal attorney at the time and had spent months digging into the Biden family.

For years, the loudest counter-charge was that the laptop was Russian disinformation. Giuliani raised that on Newsmax too, saying he and Trump spent 17 months being accused of acting as Russian agents. In September 2021 the New York Times quietly deleted the word "unsubstantiated" from a description of the Post's Biden coverage. It ran no correction and no editors' note, which was the complaint at the time.

Tucker points the finger at Israel

The new wrinkle is the Israel angle, and it came straight from Carlson. In the interview, he said people connected to the Israeli government approached him while he was still hosting at Fox News.

According to Carlson, those people pushed a specific and unproven claim: that the drive contained what Carlson called "abuse of minors." "The allegation that there was abuse of minors on the laptop? That came from the Israelis," Carlson said, adding that an Israeli "connected to Netanyahu" had brought the same claim to him and to Fox News.

Carlson offered no evidence for any of it, and the claim about the drive's contents has never been backed up. But Carlson tracing it back to Israeli sources, and nodding along with Hunter's larger theory, is what Giuliani says tipped the conversation into defamation. Rudy read Carlson's "I agree" as an endorsement that he personally took orders from a foreign leader.

Hunter Biden's sprawling theory

Hunter Biden used the sit-down to lay out his own version of how the material got out, and it was a big one. He pulled in Giuliani, Ukraine, Russia and Israel all at the same time.

Biden claimed Giuliani had been hunting for damaging material about him before the Delaware computer repair shop ever entered the picture. He also argued the files later tied to "the laptop" actually came from several places, including hacked cloud accounts, and not just one machine dropped off for repair. At one point he flatly questioned whether he ever left a laptop at that shop at all.

Both men also spent a chunk of the interview bonding over a shared target. They were openly critical of Netanyahu and of Israel's role in American politics. For a former First Son and a former Fox star, it was an odd pairing.

The friendship Rudy left out

The "Israeli agent" accusation lands oddly for one reason. Giuliani has spent years publicly bragging about how tight he is with Netanyahu.

On Fox News in November 2016 he called Netanyahu "my friend, personal friend for 25 years." He told Sean Hannity, "I never go to Israel without spending two hours with" Bibi."

So the man now enraged at being called Netanyahu's agent is also the man who volunteered, on national TV, that he never visits Israel without blocking off hours for a private meeting with the prime minister. That contrast is a big part of why the accusation got so much traction to begin with.

These two used to be on the same team

The strangest part of this whole thing is who is fighting whom. Giuliani and Carlson were allies on this exact story not long ago.

Giuliani went on Carlson's Fox News program to defend his investigation into the Biden family. Carlson, for his part, spent years pounding Hunter Biden and slamming how the mainstream press handled the laptop. They were pulling the same rope in the same direction.

Then Carlson sat down with Hunter himself on August 10. When Hunter questioned whether he ever dropped a laptop at John Paul Mac Isaac's repair shop, Carlson said the repair-shop account had always been "the weak part of the story." That admission, from a former ally, did not sit well with a man who staked so much on that exact version of events.

Will Giuliani actually sue?

For now, there is no filed lawsuit. There is a threat, delivered live on cable, and a firm "Absolutely" when he was pressed on whether he would follow through. Nothing has landed in a courtroom yet.

A defamation case would be an uphill climb. Giuliani is a public figure, which means he would have to clear the high bar of proving "actual malice," that Carlson knew what he said was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth. A host agreeing with a guest's theory, or calling part of a story "weak," is the kind of talk courts often treat as protected opinion.

Giuliani also knows defamation court from both sides. He is the same man a jury ordered in 2023 to pay $148 million to two Georgia election workers he falsely accused of fraud after the 2020 election. He settled with them in January 2025 and the judgment was recorded as satisfied the following month. Now he is the one talking about dragging someone else in for what they said out loud.

Carlson had not commented publicly as of Wednesday. The interview that started all of this is still up, and Hunter Biden's claims about the laptop, Israel and Giuliani's role are still there for anyone who wants to watch them. A fight that once had Giuliani and Carlson standing shoulder to shoulder has flipped into one that puts them on opposite ends, with Hunter Biden, of all people, sitting right in the middle.