Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu applauded Monday when the prosecution in the corruption case asked the court to allow the charge against him to be changed when a key witness retracted his previous testimony against him.
“To your face,” Netanyahu told reporters.
התגובה של נתניהו לבקשת תיקון כתב האישום: “In the face”@almog_tamar pic.twitter.com/dk9M0xXUhq
– א חדשות (@kann_news) 16 May 2022
He has faced three cases from the very beginning, which critics call speculative and overt attempts by his political enemies within Israel’s legal brotherhood to oust him from power.
In the so-called 4000 cases, considered the most serious of the three, “Netanyahu was accused of granting lucrative privileges to his then-owner Shaul Elovich. [communications firm] “In exchange for positive coverage,” Bezeq and news site Walla said.
Shlomo Filber, a former Netanyahu aide and government witness, told investigators in 2017 that Netanyahu made a gesture recommending that he “drop everything”. He later changed his story to blame Netanyahu.
But last week, Philber went back to his original story and told the court he may have misinterpreted the nonverbal signal. The prosecution then asked the court to change an important date in the indictment to address Filber’s apparent inconsistency.
Columnist Caroline Glick said the accusation was absurd at the time because the merger approval deal involving Bezeq was “approved by all relevant legal and regulatory authorities” and competitors received similar tax breaks. Bezek really lost money on the deal. Moreover, if Netanyahu was hoping for better news from Walla, he didn’t get it: “About 75 percent of the articles about him are negative,” as is the case with most of the rest of the Israeli left-wing media.
Since then, the accusation has revealed that government investigators illegally hacked Netanyahu and his colleagues’ phones and used the alleged personal information to spy on him.
Netanyahu refused to accept any agreement in the defense and insisted on proving his innocence. The persecution has weakened as the post-Netanyahu government, a coalition of rags led by former deputy Naftali Bennett, has come to the brink of internal collapse.
Joel B. Pollack is Senior Editor and news anchor for Breitbart News Breitbart Market News Every Sunday night from 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM ET (4:00 PM to 7:00 PM PT) on Sirius XM Patriot. He is the author of the recently published e-book Neither Free nor Fair: 2020 US Presidential Election. last book RETURN NOVEMBERtells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries from a conservative perspective. Won the 2018 Robert Novak Graduate Journalism Fellowship. follow him on twitter @joelpollak.
Source: Breitbart
