In a startling, recently aired Monday interview, former Fox News prime-time conservative commentator Tucker Carlson has made an explosive accusation: that Israeli agents with close ties to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were the source of a false claim that Hunter Biden, son of former U.S. President Joe Biden, had content documenting child abuse on his widely circulated 2020 leaked laptop.
Carlson told Hunter Biden during the conversation that the false allegation of child abuse material on the laptop did not originate with Russian actors, as was widely claimed by U.S. intelligence officials years ago. Instead, he said, the claim was brought directly to him by individuals connected to Netanyahu’s inner circle. “The claim that there was material involving the abuse of minors on the computer came from the Israelis. I’m just telling you that they came to me with it, and that’s how I know it,” Carlson stated during the interview.
The controversial laptop story first emerged in the final weeks of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, a race that saw Joe Biden defeat incumbent Donald Trump. The chain of events began in April 2019, when Hunter Biden left a damaged Apple laptop and an external hard drive at a Wilmington, Delaware computer repair shop owned by John Paul Mac Isaac. The Federal Bureau of Investigation took possession of the device in December 2019, months before the story broke publicly.
In October 2020, right-leaning New York Post published a series of stories based on emails pulled from the laptop, which detailed Hunter Biden’s business ties to Burisma, a Ukrainian energy firm that had appointed Hunter to its board of directors while his father served as vice president under the Obama administration. Beyond business records, the laptop contained personal content: videos showing Hunter smoking crack cocaine, engaging in sexual activity, and soliciting female sex workers. Throughout the first term of Joe Biden’s presidency, these explicit photos and videos circulated widely online, with repeated coverage from Fox News and the New York Post. Hunter Biden has never denied the authenticity of the content documenting his drug use and sexual encounters, though no credible evidence has ever emerged to support the child abuse claim that Carlson now addresses.
Carlson’s accusation upends years of mainstream U.S. intelligence framing that cast Russian misinformation as the source of the false child abuse allegation. Carlson argued that the false claim was part of an Israeli misinformation campaign, and that Washington insiders were aware of the Israeli role, but political pressure to avoid any criticism of Israel pushed officials to incorrectly pin the blame on Moscow. “They (Israel) were behind it. I felt like everybody in Washington knew it, but there was so much pressure not to criticise Israel in any way that they just said, ‘It’s the Russians, it’s the Russians,’” he said. When pressed on possible Russian involvement, Carlson acknowledged that Russian actors may have played a secondary role, but insisted that Israeli agents were the primary force pushing the false claim directly to him when he was still a top host at Fox News in 2020. Carlson also admitted he never disclosed this alleged Israeli connection during his original coverage of the laptop story while at the network.
In a striking alignment with Carlson’s allegation, Hunter Biden said he has not reached definitive conclusions about who originally orchestrated the laptop leak, but he agreed that multiple actors were involved in spreading the device’s content. These actors, he said, include Russian operatives, domestic U.S. political opponents of his father, and what he described as a “Netanyahu operation centre, the Israeli side.”
Both Carlson and Hunter Biden joined in harsh criticism of the Israeli prime minister. Hunter Biden went so far as to say, “If pointing out that Benjamin Netanyahu is evil incarnate is antisemitic, then I don’t know what to tell people anymore.”