A key state’s witness in 2018 accused law enforcement of playing games with evidence to incriminate Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with corruption charges, the prime minister’s lawyers told the Jerusalem District Court on Sunday.
The three judges hearing the case are Rivkah Friedman-Feldman, Oded Shaham and Moshe Bar-Am.
The witness in question was former top Netanyahu aide and current state’s witness Shlomo Filber, who is key to the media bribery charges against the prime minister in Case 4000.
In that case, the Bezeq-Walla Affair, Netanyahu is accused of influencing communications policy to benefit Bezeq and Walla owner (and now co-defendant) Shaul Elovitch in exchange for positive coverage from Walla.
In early 2018, Filber was not yet cooperating with the state and was also criticizing law enforcement’s claims against Netanyahu on Twitter.
However, this particular accusation was made privately in a conversation with Channel 12 reporter Amit Segal, which law enforcement later gained access to and only provided to Netanyahu’s defense team last week.
Boaz Ben Tzur, Netanyahu’s lawyer, framed this as strong additional evidence to undermine any accusations Filber later made and to argue that the court must order the prosecution to reveal all documents it calls irrelevant.
The prosecution only revealed this document last week, around 20 months after the initial announcement that Netanyahu would be indicted, indicating that prosecution claims that documents were irrelevant to the case should not be given the benefit of the doubt, Ben Tzur said.
The prosecution says what Filber said in private conversations before he turned state’s witness is less relevant than his testimony to police in which he explained why he changed his tune.
Nonetheless, they said they went above and beyond what was necessary by providing a transcript of this communication.
Also on Sunday, Jacques Chen, Elovitch’s lawyer, attacked the police for alleged mistreatment of former top Netanyahu aide and current state’s witness Nir Hefetz.
Chen recounted allegations that the state tried to extort from Hefetz an agreement to turn against the prime minister by confronting him with a woman, not his wife, with whom he was romantically connected.
Moreover, he said, the state’s refusal – because it would invade the woman’s privacy – to turn over all documents regarding how the woman was used against Hefetz was hypocritical. The state cannot accuse him of invading her privacy when it was the state that cruelly dragged her into the case in the first place, he said.
For example, Chen said, the police pretended to want to search her home and got a court order to do so in order to bring her to the police station to pressure Hefetz when they had no intention nor any need to search her house.
In another development, a dispute between the defense and the prosecution revealed that Walla CEO Ilan Yeshua not only was not indicted, he was never criminally questioned.
Defense lawyers said this is arbitrary enforcement of the law since he was also involved in the alleged Bezeq-Walla media bribery.
Questions surfaced as to why Yeshua got off without having to cut a state’s-witness deal like Filber and Hefetz.
Past reports about Yeshua’s involvement in the case have indicated he cooperated with the police much earlier than the others and was more resistant to the scheme than Filber and Hefetz.
Defense lawyers requested that the court postpone the November 29 and December 6 deadlines for responding to the indictment in writing and in person in light of the ongoing disputes over documents.
Friedman-Feldman did not grant their request on the spot, but she also did not reject it outright.
The
events transpired on Sunday during the third hearing of Netanyahu’s trial for alleged public corruption.
At stake were a number of major issues relating to the case’s critical state’s witnesses, some of whom the sides have been battling over since May and could shape the course of the trial. Witnesses are due to be called in January.
The hearing started at 9 a.m. and lasted about nine hours. It ended with the state prosecution responding in detail to the defense lawyers’ arguments.