Netanyahu prosecution set to tell court no illegal hacking, trial can go forward
Investigation into alleged police misconduct using NSO spyware finds no wrongdoing relevant to former premier’s graft cases, reports say
The prosecution in Benjamin Netanyahu’s graft trial will reportedly tell the court on Sunday that the trial can continue, after a probe into alleged police hacking misconduct in the case found no evidence of wrongdoing that would interfere with proceedings.
The prosecution will present to the court the findings of an investigation into the issue led by Deputy Attorney General Amit Marari, along with former officials from the Shin Bet and Mossad, according to Saturday media reports.
The Jerusalem District Court postponed two hearings last week to allow investigators to look into the claims, and Netanyahu’s attorneys filed a petition last week calling for a pause in the trial.
Marari’s investigation looked into 26 names that law enforcement allegedly targeted using NSO Group’s Pegasus program, according to an explosive, unsourced report by the Calcalist news outlet last week.
The probe found that there had only been irregularities regarding Shlomo Filber, a former director-general of the Communications Ministry and longtime confidant of Netanyahu. Police have already acknowledged making mistakes in Filber’s case.
Filber’s phone had been hacked without proper court authorization, but the material accessed was not relevant to Netanyahu’s case and had not been used, and therefore did not interfere with the legal proceedings, the Marari-led probe found, according to the Ynet news site.
The investigation did not turn up any other evidence of wrongdoing. The phones of three of the 26 people named in the Calcalist report had been targeted, only one of them successfully, with proper legal supervision, the Ynet report said. All three were city mayors who were under criminal investigation, the report said.
The investigatory team will continue to look into other claims that police illegally used NSO Group spyware.
Channel 13 reported that police had a court order that allowed them to access Filber’s phone when they accessed it, but had overstepped that order and illegally taken some information from the device.
The material from Filber’s phone was not passed on to those investigating the Netanyahu case, the network said.
Previous reports said the investigatory team spent several hours at the Israel Police’s SIGINT (signals intelligence) headquarters in Jerusalem, reviewing the 26 names and hundreds more phone numbers.
Among the names included in the Calcalist report were those of Avner Netanyahu, the son of the former prime minister; Emi Palmor, the former director of the Justice Ministry; prominent businessman Rami Levy; Ilan Yeshua, the former CEO of Walla and currently a top witness in the trial against Netanyahu; Netanya Mayor Miriam Feirberg; and Kiryat Ata Mayor Yaakov Peretz.
A senior police official told Channel 12 news on Friday that the allegations made against the force were “despicable.” The Calcalist report has also been described by some analysts as “libelous” against former police commissioners Roni Alsheich and Motti Cohen.
According to that network, police attempted, but failed, to hack the phones of Feirberg, Peretz, and another person, who is connected to Netanyahu’s criminal investigations, all with judicial authorization.
The only possible illegal hacking was regarding Filber, whose phone was reportedly accessed in 2017, and had the entirety of its content drained using unnamed spyware. The discovery that Filber’s phone had been targeted was made in the course of an unrelated investigation, ordered by the attorney general, into alleged police abuse of the controversial NSO Group’s Pegasus software, though a different technology was used to access Filber’s phone.
Police brass told justice officials that the data was downloaded accidentally and was never given to investigators in the Netanyahu cases.
With the current findings, a state commission of inquiry into the matter is seen as less likely, according to Friday’s television reports.
The Times of Israel Community.