Rudy Giuliani says he plans to sue Tucker Carlson for allegedly agreeing on-air that Giuliani and President Trump acted as agents for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a charge Giuliani calls flatly false.
Giuliani made the announcement during an August 24 appearance on Newsmax, responding to an interview Carlson conducted with Hunter Biden earlier in August. During that sit-down, Carlson told Biden that the infamous laptop hard drive "came from the Israelis," adding, "I'm just telling you that they came to me with that." Biden, for his part, claimed the laptop contained nothing beyond evidence of his drug use and called Giuliani's characterization of its contents "an absolute, complete, and utter effing lie."
Giuliani, who served as Trump's personal lawyer during the 2020 presidential campaign and personally delivered a copy of the hard drive to the New York Post, took the exchange as a direct attack on his credibility and his loyalty to the United States.
As the New York Post reported, Giuliani laid out his grievance in blunt terms:
"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! I don't know what has happened to Tucker Carlson, but if he's not working for somebody else, he's doing a good imitation of it."
He went further, telling Newsmax viewers that Carlson could "go to h***."
Giuliani's complaint centers on a specific moment in the Carlson-Biden interview. Biden reportedly claimed that Netanyahu orchestrated the laptop's emergence as a political weapon during the 2020 race. Giuliani told Newsmax that Carlson then responded with "I agree", which Giuliani interprets as Carlson endorsing the claim that both he and Trump were acting as agents for the Israeli prime minister.
"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,'" Giuliani said. "In other words, he agrees that I was and Trump was an agent for Bibi."
Giuliani also said Hunter Biden "personally defamed" him during the interview. But he stopped short of announcing legal action against Biden, focusing his fire squarely on Carlson. He offered no explanation for the distinction.
The former New York City mayor has been a fixture of conservative media for decades, and his public standing has become a recurring flashpoint in political debates, from his role in the 2020 election fight to his recent clashes with New York City's current leadership.
The laptop has been a political grenade since October 2020, when the New York Post first published its contents. Giuliani, then working as Trump's personal attorney during a heated presidential race against Joe Biden, had obtained a copy of the hard drive. He shared files from it with the Post and separately visited a New Castle County, Delaware, police station, where he told officers the drive contained evidence of crimes.
Hunter Biden initially dismissed the laptop as part of a Russian disinformation campaign. In the Carlson interview, he shifted to a different claim: that the laptop "had no evidence of anything other than I was a drug user." He called Giuliani's characterization of the contents "bulls***."
Biden also alleged during the interview that Giuliani told Delaware police the laptop contained images of minor children, a claim Biden characterized as false. The full context of that exchange was not detailed in the Post's reporting.
Giuliani's combative posture on the issue is not new. He has repeatedly inserted himself into public controversies when he believes his record or reputation is under attack.
This is not the first time the laptop has ended up in a courtroom, or at least at the courthouse door. In September 2023, Hunter Biden sued Giuliani, claiming the former mayor violated federal and state computer privacy and fraud laws by handling and distributing the hard drive's contents. That suit was dropped in June 2024 after both sides agreed to dismiss the case without prejudice, meaning either party could theoretically refile.
Now Giuliani wants to be the one doing the suing. But key details remain missing. He did not name a jurisdiction, identify a specific legal theory, or confirm that any filing has actually been made. His announcement amounted to a public declaration of intent, delivered on cable television rather than through a court clerk's office.
Neither Carlson nor Biden's office responded to the Post's request for comment. Giuliani's own quoted remarks appear to have been drawn from his Newsmax appearance rather than a direct interview with the Post.
Giuliani's willingness to pick public fights has kept him relevant, and controversial. His recent demand that New York's mayor stay away from Ground Zero ceremonies showed the same instinct: confront perceived disrespect head-on, in the loudest room available.
Several parts of Giuliani's case remain unclear. The exact exchange between Carlson and Biden, and whether Carlson's "I agree" was a blanket endorsement of the Netanyahu-agent theory or a narrower comment about the hard drive's origins, is not established beyond Giuliani's characterization. Carlson's own quote from the interview references the Israelis bringing him the hard drive, but the leap from that statement to "Giuliani and Trump were agents for Netanyahu" involves interpretation that Giuliani has not publicly documented.
Giuliani also did not explain why he would sue Carlson but not Biden, despite claiming both men defamed him. That gap invites obvious questions about whether the threatened lawsuit is a legal strategy or a public-relations maneuver.
And there is the matter of the laptop itself. Hunter Biden's shifting explanations, from Russian disinformation to "just drug use", have done more to validate the story's significance than anything Giuliani could say. Biden's own prior lawsuit against Giuliani, filed and then abandoned, suggests even Biden's legal team eventually decided the courtroom was not the best venue for that fight.
When the people who spent years calling the laptop fake start arguing about who really leaked it and why, the original story has already won.
