Regaining credibility in Netanyahu corruption case - analysis

It’s back.

After a hiatus of many months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial-- which had been progressing at a snail's pace before the Gaza war and even slower ever since -- burst back onto the country’s front pages Tuesday with the state prosecutor’s office announcing interest in canceling the state’s witness deal it signed with Shlomo Filber and prosecuting him instead.

For most people, Filber -- if they have heard of him at all -- is but a vague name from the past. But not for those carefully following the twists and turns in the eight-year saga of Netanyahu’s legal woes. For them, Filber is a star.

Filber was the director-general of the communications ministry between 2015 - 2018 when Netanyahu also served as communications minister. He was allegedly a conduit between Netanyahu and Shaul Elovitch, the then owner of the Walla internet site who also had a controlling share in Bezeq, in the alleged regulatory-favors-for-positive-coverage scheme that stands at the center of Case 4000, the most significant of the cases against Netanyahu.

Filber, once a close confidant of the prime minister who ran the Likud’s campaign in 2015, turned state’s witness, and in exchange for immunity from prosecution for his own part in the alleged scandal that had Netanyahu trade regulatory favors worth hundreds of millions of shekels for positive coverage in Walla,  implicated his boss during police questioning. Much of the state’s bribery case against Netanyahu in Case 4000 rested on Filber’s testimony.

So it was with great anticipation that the country awaited his testimony in March 2022. But then, at least from the perspective of the prosecution, something went awry: Filber did not deliver the goods.

For instance, it came out during his testimony in court that an incriminatory meeting between Filber and Netanyahu did not happen when the prosecution said it happened, and -- if the defense was to be believed  -- might not have happened at all.

Filber also testified in court that he was granted an offer to turn state’s witness and testify against Netanyahu three months before the attorney-general -- as he was legally bound to do -- approved the investigation of the prime minister.

On Monday, a year and ten months after Filber -- a pollster who reportedly numbers the Likud among his clients -- stepped down from the witness stand, the state’s attorney is now weighing whether to annul the agreement and prosecute Filber for his alleged role in the affair. A decision on this matter will be made after Filber has a hearing with the State Attorney’s Office.

One of the big questions in this dramatic turn of events is why go after Filber nearly two years after his testimony? If the testimony Filber gave in Jerusalem District Court contradicted the testimony he gave to the police, then that was obvious immediately. Why wait nearly two years to make a decision? Might this long wait be proof of little more than a desire to get back at Filber for complicating the bribery case against Netanyahu?

Last year the three judges trying the case held a closed-door meeting with the lawyers of both sides and said it was unlikely the state would prove there was bribery in this case, the most significant charge against Netanyahu, so the prosecution has good cause to be furious with Filber.

Yehuda Shaffer, a former deputy state prosecutor, was asked this question in a Kan bet interview on Tuesday. And his answer was insightful.

A country split into two camps

Ever since the police first began investigation wrongdoing on Netanyahu’s part in December 2016 (the prime minister’s supporters call it a ‘fishing expedition’), the country split into two camps. There was the pro-Netanyahu camp, which believed with all its heart and soul the prime minister’s protestations of innocence and argued that his opponents were using the law to do what they could not do at the ballot box: bring the prime minister down.

The anti-Netanyahu camp dismissed that out of hand, saying that the state attorney and attorney general were just doing their duty: weeding out corruption at the highest levels of Israel’s government.

The pro-Netanyahu camp argued that Netanyahu was being unduly persecuted, and that all the indictments against him were cooked up to drive him from office. The anti-Netanyahu camp countered that the prime minister was corrupt up to his eyeballs. They also argued that Filber’s testimony to the police helped prove that. 

Except that Filber then reversed track.

The reason the state is now going after Filber, Shaffer argued,  is to restore trust in the system; to show that the state did not cook up a case against Netanyahu, but that it was based on solid evidence provided by Filber.

Filber misled us, the prosecution is now saying,  and as such that needs to come out into the open so that the public understands that this case -- one which sent the country spiraling into political instability --  was not fabricated, but was based on evidence. The problem is that the man who provided that evidence then did a U-turn.  The prosecution has an interest that this comes out in court through an indictment now of Filber so that the narrative that the whole case against Netanyahu was made up out of full cloth does not gain more traction than it already has.