In affidavit to High Court, PM calls Bar’s claims he tried to avoid testifying ‘totally false’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects Shin Bet head Ronen Bar’s allegation that he tried to get the security chief to fraudulently help him postpone his testimony in his criminal trial, calling it “totally false.”

Writing in an affidavit to the High Court of Justice in response to Bar’s own affidavit last week, Netanyahu provides formal transcripts of his conversations with Bar in official meetings the two held in which Netanyahu said he wanted the Shin Bet chief to provide solutions to enable him to testify in a secure location.

Bar alleged that Netanyahu asked him to tell the Jerusalem District Court that the prime minister was unable to appear in a public location on a regular basis due to security concerns that he might be subject to an attack.

The Jerusalem District Court has no bombproof spaces, and Netanyahu’s hearings were ultimately relocated to a bombproof room in the Tel Aviv District Court.

“In my opinion there are solutions, even relatively simple solutions, but [you] need to give these solutions so that I can on the one hand carry out my testimony, and on the other hand [for me] not to die, and so that the legal teams, the judges etc, don’t die together with me,” quotes Netanyahu from the stenographer’s transcript of a meeting the two men had on the topic on November 13, 2024.

In another meeting on November 17 where they discussed the issue again, Netanyahu writes in his affidavit that Bar had not yet offered alternatives to the Jerusalem District Court.

“Nothing needs to be done to delay the trial,” Netanyahu cites himself as telling Bar in that second meeting.

“At no point did I ask Bar to invent a position paper establishing that my testimony could not be held. This claim is totally false. The opposite is true, I said to him explicitly that I want to testify and that the trial should not be delayed by even one day,” writes the prime minister.