Giuliani says he will sue Tucker Carlson over Netanyahu agent claim

Rudy Giuliani said he intends to sue Tucker Carlson for defamation, telling Newsmax on Sunday, August 23, that the former Fox News host had smeared him during an interview with Hunter Biden by suggesting Giuliani acted as an agent for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He said he would file the case and would not back down.

The fight centers on Carlson's August 10 conversation with Biden on The Tucker Carlson Show, in which the two revisited how material from a laptop tied to the former president's son reached the press in 2020. Giuliani, who handed a copy of the hard drive to the New York Post, said both Biden and Carlson defamed him when they discussed how the contents leaked.

Asked by the Newsmax host whether he would actually follow through, Giuliani answered, 'Absolutely.' The stated basis for his complaint is Carlson's apparent agreement that Giuliani and President Donald Trump had worked as agents for Netanyahu, a man Giuliani has long described as a personal friend of 25 years. He rejected the label as false and said it had been disproven many times over.

The interview that set it off

Carlson and Biden sat down earlier this month for a wide-ranging talk that turned to the origins of the laptop story. Carlson told Biden he had always believed the computer itself was real but questioned the accepted account of how its contents entered the media bloodstream. Biden, for his part, called Netanyahu 'evil incarnate' and floated a sprawling theory involving Giuliani, Ukraine, Russia and Israel, claiming Giuliani had been hunting for material about him well before a Delaware repair shop ever entered the picture.

Giuliani watched the exchange and read it as an accusation aimed squarely at him. On Newsmax he pivoted from a separate clip of Biden on Bill Maher's show to Carlson's interview, arguing that the podcaster had let Biden rewrite the history of a scandal Giuliani helped set in motion. He said he did not recognize the Carlson he was watching.

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!

Giuliani zeroed in on a moment near the end of the segment. As he described it, Biden said Netanyahu had set up the laptop leak, and at the conclusion of that claim Carlson responded, 'I agree.' Giuliani took the two words as Carlson endorsing the idea that he and Trump had been foreign agents rather than lawyers acting for a client, and he treated that reading as settled.

What Carlson said about the laptop

Carlson, once among the loudest promoters of the laptop story during his years at Fox News, told Biden that people connected to the Israeli government had approached him at the network. Those figures, he said, pushed the claim that the hard drive contained abusive images of minors. He offered no evidence for that account, and framed the allegation as something handed to him rather than something he generated.

The claim about material involving children traces back to Giuliani himself, who said in 2020 that the laptop held images of underage girls. That allegation was never substantiated. Carlson now attributes the same claim to Israeli contacts he says were connected to Netanyahu, and told Biden he had not repeated it himself on Fox News. Giuliani insists the exchange crossed the line into defamation.

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

Carlson also picked apart the part of the story that placed a laptop at a Delaware repair shop owned by John Paul Mac Isaac. When Biden questioned whether he had ever dropped off a computer there, Carlson said the repair-shop account had always been 'the weak part of the story.' That line, aimed at the foundation of Giuliani's version, did not sit well with him.

Biden disputed the standard narrative more broadly, arguing that material later attributed to the laptop actually came from several sources, including hacked cloud accounts. The New York Times removed the word unsubstantiated from its laptop coverage in September 2021, without issuing a correction or an editor's note. That edit sits underneath the current fight.

A denial and an old friendship

Giuliani rejected the agent claim without qualification, insisting his work on the Biden family was his own. He has said for years that his interest in the laptop stemmed from his role representing Trump, not from any foreign government. The long friendship with Netanyahu, he argues, has nothing to do with the legal work he performed for his client.

The clash is notable because Giuliani and Carlson once stood on the same side of this exact fight. Giuliani appeared on Carlson's Fox News program to defend his investigation of the Biden family, and Carlson spent years attacking Hunter Biden and criticizing how the media establishment handled the laptop. Now Biden sits with Carlson, Carlson questions the story, and Giuliani talks about court.

He personally defamed me, Hunter Biden did. And so did Tucker, and I'm seriously considering suing him.

He reserved some of his sharpest words for how Carlson treated Biden on air. Giuliani accused the host of handling the former first son gently, saying Carlson 'virtually had Hunter on his lap, feeding him a bottle.' The image captured his broader complaint that Carlson had turned soft on a man he once spent years hammering on the same subject.

Whether any of it meets the legal standard for defamation is a separate question entirely. A public figure like Giuliani would have to show that a false statement of fact was made with actual malice, a high bar that turns on precisely what Carlson said, what he meant, and whether two words of agreement amount to an assertion of fact about him at all. The bar for public figures is deliberately steep.

Giuliani promises to take Carlson to court

Giuliani made the announcement during a Sunday appearance on Newsmax, delivered as an unscripted burst of anger rather than a prepared legal statement. He did not name a court, a filing date or an attorney, and no complaint has been made public. What he offered was intent, stated without hedging.

The 2020 laptop episode put Giuliani at the center of one of the most contested stories of that election. He obtained a copy of the hard drive and passed it to the New York Post, which published its contents in the weeks before voters went to the polls. The stories described drug use and other behavior, and drew immediate scrutiny over how the material had been sourced.

Portions of that account remain unverified six years later. The material has been revisited in interviews, court fights and partisan disputes ever since, and it has never fully settled into an agreed set of facts. Carlson's comments pulled the entire argument back into public view, this time with a direct threat of litigation attached and a new claim about who first raised the abuse allegation.

Carlson has not publicly responded to the threat. His comments about Israeli contacts and the laptop were made during the interview and echoed by Biden, who has separately accused Giuliani of defaming him for pushing the same false narrative about material involving children.

The falling-out reflects a wider split among figures who once shared a story. Carlson, running his own show after leaving Fox News, has grown openly critical of Israel and its role in American politics, a stance Biden shared during their talk when both men condemned the country's strikes in Gaza and its influence in Washington.

For now the case exists only in Giuliani's words on a cable set. He affirmed his intent when pressed, but the distance between a televised vow and a filed complaint is where such threats often stall. Nothing on the public record shows a suit has actually begun, and he named no lawyer to bring it.

Where the dispute stands now

No lawsuit had been filed as of Giuliani's Newsmax appearance, and he set no deadline for one. The central question, if a complaint ever arrives, is whether Carlson's single word of agreement can carry the weight Giuliani wants to place on it. A defamation case would force a court to parse an offhand television remark, decide what it asserted, and weigh it against a record that both sides read differently. Until then the dispute remains a public one, waged on television rather than in a courtroom.