Prosecutors say Netanyahu’s lawyer used quotes from wrong individual, asks court to strike from record

The State Attorney’s Office requests that the Jerusalem District Court strike from the record evidence brought by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s defense attorney Amit Hadad of extremely hostile comments supposedly made by an editor of the Walla news website against Netanyahu, but which turn out to have been made by a different individual.

In a hearing on Wednesday, Hadad focused on the attitude of Walla’s senior staff to Netanyahu, because a central aspect of the allegations against the prime minister is that he had an illicit quid pro quo agreement with Walla’s owner Shaul Elovitch in which Netanyahu would receive favorable coverage from Walla in return for Netanyahu making regulatory decisions which favored Elovitch’s business interests.

During the hearing, Hadad quoted tweets supposedly by Walla editor in chief Avi Alkalai in which he said he “loathed” Netanyahu and called his 2013 government “traitorous and destructive.”

Hadad used the quotes, among other hostile comments from other Walla staff, to assert that Walla was hostile to Netanyahu and that he did not receive favorable coverage from the website, as part of the defense’s strategy of undermining the claim that there was a quid pro quo agreement with Elovitch.

But the State Attorney’s Office says that following complaints from Alkalai, and after it conducted a “basic and superficial check,” it discovered that the tweets cited by Hadad had come from a different Avi Alkalai who was not connected to the Walla editor in chief. The individual with the Twitter account in question even stated on numerous occasions that he was not the Walla editor, the State Attorney’s Office says.

The prosecutors request that the quotes be stricken from the record and that the court ignore them.