Knesset Interior and the Environment Committee Chairman and MK David Amsalem (Likud) on Sunday told Israel Radio, responding to a report in Ha’aretz that Prime Minister Netanyahu had been taped discussing illegal gifts with a businessman, that in a democratic system government is changed through elections, while in Israel it’s done through “police coups.” Amsalem stressed that he saw nothing wrong with Netanyahu receiving personal gifts from friends, stating he saw no need for an approval from the AG every time the PM receives a gift.
A highly politicized report, even by Ha’aretz standards, on Sunday offered few details and much innuendo on “Case 2000,” which “focuses on documented contacts between Netanyahu and a businessman over mutual benefits.” The maliciously anti-Netanyahu paper reports on an alleged attempt to forge a “blatant deal between capital and government.”
While Ha’aretz does not have more to offer on this deal, it asserts that the case is not about “receiving suitcases full of cash in return for natural gas monopoly, or a bank transfer to a numbered account of infrastructure or mineral concessions.”
The paper continues to describe the suspicions against the PM with no more detail, except to say that the evidence in this case is “solid, damaging and reverberating.” The report also says that Netanyahu was taken aback when he heard the recording during his police interrogation last Thursday.
Moving blithely from the role of reporter to that of a political advocate, Ha’aretz suggests the information against the PM in this new case has been sitting on AG Avichai Mandelblit’s desk since the spring, and that only because of the mounting evidence of the severity of the evidence did he now join the investigation, “to try and determine the narrative that’s most beneficial to Netanyahu.”
Meanwhile, MK Amsalem is working on a bill to prohibit the investigation of a prime minister in office on violations of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.