Rudy Giuliani wants to drag Tucker Carlson into court. The former New York City mayor said he plans to sue the podcaster for defamation, and he delivered the threat with the volume turned all the way up during a Newsmax appearance on Sunday, August 23. No case has been filed.
The trigger was Carlson’s recent interview with Hunter Biden, released August 10, in which the two men picked apart the story of how the contents of Hunter’s laptop reached the public back in 2020. Giuliani was central to that story. He is not happy about how Carlson is telling it now.
He Can Go to Hell
Giuliani did not soften a single word. Asked on air whether he would actually file, he answered, “Absolutely.” He said both Carlson and Biden defamed him. “He personally defamed me, Hunter Biden did. And so did Tucker and I’m seriously considering suing him,” he told the Newsmax host.
“He can go to hell,” Giuliani added. “I wasn’t an agent for anybody but myself and the United States of America and the man I was representing.”
He also took a shot at Carlson personally, hinting that the podcaster had switched teams. “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.” It was a striking thing to say about a man Giuliani used to sit next to on cable news.
The Two Words That Set Him Off
The moment Giuliani keeps circling back to is short. 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 for any of it. Carlson’s “I agree” came at the end of his own point that once the material starts circulating, “all kinds of people get involved and they’re shopping it for different reasons.” Giuliani reads that as Carlson signing onto the idea that he and Donald Trump had acted as agents for the Israeli prime minister.
That is the whole case, at least as Giuliani frames it. Two words on a podcast, and a former ally suddenly stands accused of calling him a foreign operative on tape. Giuliani says the charge is false and damaging, and he says he can prove it. “That’s been proven 40 times over,” he said.
He also could not get past the tone of the sit-down. Giuliani accused Carlson of treating Hunter like a newborn instead of a subject. “Tucker virtually had Hunter on his lap, feeding him a bottle,” he seethed. “I’m gonna sue him!”
What Carlson Actually Said
Carlson’s version is more tangled than a one-word agreement. He told Hunter he had always believed the laptop itself was real, but that he doubted the accepted story of how its contents got out. He said the repair-shop account, the tale about a Delaware computer shop, had always been “the weak part of the story.” That single line reportedly infuriated Giuliani more than almost anything else.
Carlson went further. He claimed that while he was still at Fox News, people connected to Netanyahu came to him and the network with a specific and ugly allegation: that the laptop contained abusive material involving minors. He offered no evidence for it. “The allegation that there was abuse of minors on the laptop? That came from the Israelis,” Carlson said in the interview.
He said he sent one of his producers to meet a person tied to Netanyahu, and that he came away believing the Israelis, not the Russians, had been pushing the story. “I felt that everybody in DC knew that. But there was so much pressure never to criticize Israel in any way that they were just like, It’s the Russians, it’s the Russians, they’re the ones penetrating our political system,” Carlson recalled. He admitted he never said any of this out loud while he was still on the Fox payroll.
Giuliani and Netanyahu Go Back Decades
The “agent” label stings partly because Giuliani has spent years bragging about how close he is to Netanyahu. On Fox News in November 2016 he called him “my friend, personal friend for 25 years” and told Sean Hannity, “I never go to Israel without spending two hours with” the Israeli leader.
That long friendship is exactly why the accusation lands the way it does. Giuliani’s argument is that being friendly with a foreign leader is not remotely the same as working for one. He can call Netanyahu a buddy and still deny ever taking orders from him, and that distinction is the fight he now wants a court to settle.
These Two Used to Be on the Same Side
The whole feud is a full reversal. Giuliani used to appear on Carlson’s Fox News program to defend his investigation into the Biden family. Carlson, for his part, spent years pounding Hunter Biden on air and blasting the way the media establishment buried the laptop story before the 2020 vote. They were reading from the same script.
Now Hunter Biden sits across from Carlson, Carlson pokes holes in the parts of the laptop story that Giuliani helped push into the world, and Giuliani is threatening a lawsuit.
The Laptop Story at the Center of It All
Giuliani’s fingerprints are on the original story from the start. He gave the New York Post a copy of the hard drive, and the paper published its first report on October 14, 2020. Twitter blocked links to it and locked the Post’s account for 16 days; Facebook limited how widely it spread pending a fact-check.
Hunter Biden’s account, offered during the Carlson interview, cuts hard against that history. He argued that material later attributed to the laptop actually came from more than one place, including hacked cloud accounts. He also claimed Giuliani had been hunting for material about him before the Delaware repair shop ever entered the picture. Biden did not hold back on Netanyahu either, calling him “evil incarnate” during the conversation.
Rudy’s Old Russia Grievance
A lot of Giuliani’s anger is years in the making. He brought up a different accusation he says haunted him for a long stretch. “For 17 months, President Trump and I were charged by Biden in a debate with being Russian agents,” he said. Being called Netanyahu’s agent now feels, to him, like the same smear with a new country attached.
He pointed to the New York Times, which in September 2021 quietly deleted the word “unsubstantiated” from a description of the Post’s Biden coverage. The paper ran no correction and no editors’ note, which was the complaint at the time. Giuliani described the change sarcastically as being written “in Chinese in the English edition,” his way of saying nobody was ever meant to actually read it.
Where Things Stand
For now, the lawsuit is a promise and not a filing. Giuliani said he was “seriously considering” it in one breath and flatly declared “I’m gonna sue him” in the next. Any defamation case would come down to whether Carlson’s comments about Giuliani’s role crossed from protected opinion into a false statement of fact, which is a high bar for a public figure to clear.
There is recent history worth knowing about how these laptop fights tend to end. In March 2025, Hunter Biden dropped his own laptop-hacking lawsuit against Garrett Ziegler, a former White House policy analyst under trade adviser Peter Navarro whom he had accused of using private material pulled from the computer. A judge dismissed it with prejudice in March 2025, over Biden’s objection, after Biden moved to drop it citing his debts and the Los Angeles wildfires.
Carlson had not commented publicly as of Wednesday. If Giuliani files, two men who spent years building the laptop narrative together will spend the next chapter arguing about it in front of a judge.
