Smotrich on classified leak case: ‘This is what a real coup looks like’

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich comments on the classified leak affair, charging, “This is what a real coup looks like.”

“When a secret intelligence organization uses the draconian powers granted to it specifically for security purposes against elected officials and journalists, while completely losing its brakes and controls. When an elected government seeks to remove from office a failed Shin Bet chief who has betrayed and undermined it, and the attorney general and the court violently prevent this,” he writes on X.

Smotrich says that Israel is on a “slippery and dangerous slope,” charging that the actions of law enforcement agencies threaten democracy. He says the Shin Bet official who leaked classified information to journalists and Diaspora Affairs Minister Amichai Chikli should be the next head of the security service.