Las Vegas business magnate Sheldon Adelson has called former prime minister Ehud
Olmert’s claim that he manipulated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to advance
the election of Mitt Romney as US president “absurd.”
In a meeting with
American Jewish leaders last week, Olmert charged that Netanyahu “intervened in
the US elections in the name of an American billionaire with a clear interest in
the vote,” and that the “very same billionaire used Israel’s prime minister to
advance a nominee of his own for president.”
Adelson, who owns the Israel
HaYom daily, was a major donor to Romney’s campaign and is a friend of
Netanyahu, writes in an op-ed in today’s Jerusalem Post that Olmert “is crediting
me with a degree of power that I simply don’t have."
“The prime minister
of Israel is very much his own man. I can also attest that Bibi has always
maintained a neutral position vis-à-vis the US presidential election, as would
any sensible Israeli leader.”
