Judges express skepticism over dozens of incidents cited in Netanyahu indictment

Prosecutors in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial faced a setback on Wednesday when the judges cast doubt on whether the premier was involved in key incidents, leading the defense to confidently proclaim there was no “reasonable chance of a conviction.”

In an awkward development for the prosecution, head prosecutor Attorney Yehudit Tirosh said she would have to review dozens of alleged examples of Netanyahu’s interference in Walla news coverage, after the judges presiding over the case challenged his involvement in such incidents.

At the beginning of the hearing, Netanyahu’s defense attorney Amit Hadad asserted that a large proportion of incidents involving favorable media coverage requests cited by the indictment were done without the knowledge or involvement of Netanyahu or his family members, while dozens of other incidents arose from internal conversations among Walla senior staff.

Judge Moshe Baraam asked prosecutor Tirosh if the indictment claimed that Netanyahu could have been involved in the requests without being aware of them, to which she said no. However, Judge Oded Shaham questioned her further asking how the prime minister was involved in such incidents.

During the questioning, Tirosh requested a pause in proceedings to review the indictment in order to provide the judges with an answer. The judges insisted on pressing on with the hearing.

Netanyahu for his part sat in the witness box with a discernible grin on his face at the prosecutor’s predicament.

The exchange at the beginning of Wednesday’s hearing, Netanyahu’s fourth day of testimony in his criminal trial on corruption charges, was followed by a day of testimony in which Hadad once again examined one by one the list of alleged requests by Netanyahu and his associates for favorable coverage on the Walla news site.

The attorney and the prime minister sought to demonstrate, with a fair amount of success, that Walla was both hostile and unresponsive to requests to improve its coverage, contradicting the allegations of the indictment.

Netanyahu’s testimony focused again on Case 4000, the most serious of the three cases against him, in which the prosecution alleges that the prime minister accepted a bribe in the form of positive news coverage from telecom mogul Shaul Elovitch, Walla’s owner, in exchange for advancing regulatory decisions that benefited the latter to the tune of NIS 1.8 billion shekels.

During the course of the day, Netanyahu insisted that he was uninvolved and unaware of the overwhelming majority of requests made to Walla’s CEO Ilan Yeshua by his wife’s friend Zeev Rubinstein, that he didn’t have the time, awareness or inclination to involve himself in the particulars of Walla’s political coverage, and that he did not discuss its coverage with his wife Sara either.

Hadad told the judges, however, that the defense would not be requesting that Sara Netanyahu testify in court.

Several of the alleged examples cited by the indictment, on which Hadad focused his attention, stood out in the degree to which they appeared to contradict the prosecution’s allegations.

One example dealt with Walla’s coverage of the resignation of Netanyahu’s chief of staff Gil Sheffer in 2013, which framed Sheffer’s decision as the latest in a series of Netanyahu aides to quit, with the headline declaring “The abandonment continues.”

Netanyahu said in court that Walla’s framing was antagonistic to him, and when presented with the neutral language coverage of resignation in the Globes newspaper and Haaretz, known for its hostility to Netanyahu, the prime minister opined that Walla’s coverage had been the worst, describing it as “malicious.”

Another example Hadad focused on was Walla’s negative coverage of Sara Netanyahu’s trip to the West Point military cemetery in the US to visit and lay flowers on the grave of Israeli General Mickey Marcus who fought and died in Israel’s War of Independence and who before that had been a US colonel.

Walla framed the article negatively with a headline accusing Sara Netanyahu of going on “an outing while her husband delivers a speech.”

In court, Netanyahu responded, “It’s not only negative, it’s contemptible. She wasn’t on an outing; she went to do something fitting for the wife of a prime minister to do. She wasn’t going shopping, [she placed] a bouquet for the State of Israel on the grave of a hero of Israel.”

As with many of the examples brought by the indictment, Rubinstein requested from Walla CEO Ilan Yeshua that the article be changed and the indictment alleges that Netanyahu was personally involved in the request, and that Walla positively addressed it.

“I had no hand in this, not a finger, not fingernail, because I was very, very busy,” insisted Netanyahu, who has repeated that he believed Walla to have been an “unimportant” and “marginal” website that was not on his radar and which he had no time or inclination to deal with.

Netanyahu again asserted that he had been largely unaware of  Rubinstein’s many requests to Yeshua, even when Rubinstein consulted with Sara about Walla’s coverage, due to his time-consuming job since he and Sara rarely if ever had the opportunity to discuss such matters.

“Your honors – if only I could be an attentive ear to my wife. Unfortunately, the type of life we live, the job I have, this is not possible. We meet late at night for a few minutes, we talk about the children and the family,” said Netanyahu addressing the Jerusalem District Court judges directly. 
“There is no possibility of going over all the events of the day, it doesn’t exist,” he continued.

Hadad noted that Rubinstein’s message to Yeshua regarding the West Point report was worded in a pleading manner, which Netanyahu argued contradicts the claim that he had a quid pro quo agreement with Walla owner Elovitch, since if that was the case his alleged go-between would not need to plead for better coverage, but rather demand it.

Hadad also pointed out that the alleged positive “response” from Walla to Rubinstein’s request was simply to remove the article from the website, 11 hours after Rubinstein’s message to Yeshua, and not to reframe the item more positively.

During the course of the hearing, the judges again expressed a degree of frustration with Netanyahu’s slow-paced testimony, but the prime minister was insistent that the forensic examination was important and denounced as “outrageous” the fact that the police had failed to ask him about all but a tiny majority of the examples of favorable coverage he had allegedly solicited from Elovitch.

Judge Oded Shaham asked Hadad at one stage if he needed to repeat the same questions to Netanyahu regarding every example of alleged interference in Walla’s coverage mentioned in the indictment.

Hadad countered that if he did not do so, the prosecution would claim that the defense had not successfully countered the allegations, leading to a tetchy exchange with Tirosh.

“The court recommended you drop the [bribery] charges,” Hadad snapped at Tirosh, in reference to the recommendation by the court to the prosecution about Case 4000 in June last year.

“You have no reasonable chance of a conviction; you have nothing,” the attorney sniped.

Netanyahu was similarly dismissive.

“This is what they say is bribery, these non-stories. This nonsense, this ‘intense and unusual connection’ which doesn’t exist,” fumed Netanyahu in reference to the wording of the indictment alleging that the connection between him and Elovitch and Walla was “intense and unusual.”

“It’s outrageous that I wasn’t asked about these incidents… They’re accusing me of a blanket accusation of receiving benefits through bribery… But they didn’t ask me then, so we’ll do it now,” said Netanyahu.

The charges

Netanyahu is on trial in three corruption cases. He faces charges of fraud and breach of trust in Case 1000 and Case 2000, and charges of bribery, as well as fraud and breach of trust in Case 4000.

Case 1000 revolves around allegations that Netanyahu and his wife Sara received expensive gifts illicitly from Hollywood media mogul Arnon Milchan worth some NIS 700,000 and that Netanyahu violated conflict of interest laws when he provided Milchan with assistance in renewing his long-term US residency visa and sought to help him with tax issues.

In Case 2000, the prime minister is accused of fraud and breach of trust over his alleged attempt to reach a quid pro quo agreement with the publisher of the Yedioth Aharaonot newspaper Arnon (Noni) Mozes, whereby Yedioth would give the prime minister more positive media coverage in exchange for legislation weakening its key rival, the Israel Hayom free sheet.

Case 4000, also known as the Bezeq-Walla case, is the most serious the prime minister faces, in which he is accused of authorizing regulatory decisions that financially benefited Bezeq telecommunications giant shareholder Elovitch by hundreds of millions of shekels. In return, Netanyahu allegedly received favorable media coverage from the Walla news site, which Elovitch also owned.

Netanyahu denies wrongdoing and says the charges were fabricated in a political coup led by the police and state prosecution.