The Jerusalem District Court on Tuesday ordered an additional one-week delay in the public corruption trial of former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It follows a prior three-week postponement.
The trial has been frozen since June 16. It will now reconvene to restart witness testimony on July 12 instead of July 5.
Essentially, the additional one-week delay is the result of a disagreement between the prosecution and the defense about how to handle new documents from the cellphone of former Walla CEO Ilan Yeshua, which will be added into the trial.
Previously, the prosecution and the defense had spent April, May and June presenting the court with extensive evidence from Yeshua’s cellphone, regarding Case 4000, the Bezeq-Walla Media Bribery Affair.
The prosecution has alleged that Netanyahu used his powers to favor Bezeq in telecommunications policy in exchange for favorable media coverage from the Walla news site. Both companies are owned by co-defendant Shaul Elovitch.
However, as extensive as the previous evidence from Yeshua’s cellphone was about Case 4000, the prosecution had focused on text messages between Yeshua and Netanyahu messengers, or Shaul and Iris Elovitch, and had not dug deeply into messages Yeshua sent to other politicians or third parties.
Until the court in mid-June ordered the prosecution to perform searches of these text messages and provide new documents to the defense, the state’s position was that such documents were not relevant to the case.
In contrast, the defense argued that such documents could show that Yeshua and Walla gave special treatment to many politicians who interacted directly with him as CEO and not only to Netanyahu.
They hope this analogy will disprove any bribery charge.
The prosecution argues that this does not help Netanyahu because only he, out of all of the politicians, made a deal with Elovitch to systematically influence coverage at Walla for four years from 2013-2016 and used government powers to “pay” for this slanted coverage.
Defense lawyers had accidentally been given some text messages between Yeshua and other politicians by the prosecution. But apparently there is far more material they were not given, which the court has ruled is relevant.
The latest dispute between the defense and the prosecution is that the state is saying since it is now also seeing this material for the first time, the new evidence should not only benefit the defense, and it should also help the prosecution.
In contrast, the defense has argued that the prosecution is the powerful body with control of the evidence.
The defense has said if the prosecution did not use this evidence for its case against Netanyahu until now, it cannot get a “second bite at the apple” simply because the defense has forced it to turn over new evidence helpful to the defense, which the prosecution previously withheld.
Resolution of the question of whether the prosecution can use new anti-Netanyahu evidence it now finds has been pushed off to a later date. But the dispute delayed the transfer of documents to the defense by a week, delaying the return of witnesses by another week.
Although the prosecution had suggested that the trial continue as scheduled on July 5 with a new witness, former communications director-general Avi Berger, the defense convinced the court it would not be ready for a new witness so soon.
The trial will recess again from July 21 until September 1 as part of the general court summer recess, and there will only be a few hearings in September due to the High Holy Days and Sukkot.
All of this means Yeshua’s testimony will probably not finish before October.
Earlier in June, the prosecution said it had never claimed it had researched all other politicians and power brokers in Yeshua’s text messages, adding that this was not relevant and could violate the personal privacy of many people.
The prosecution said about 150,000 lines of content had not been transferred, implying that the defense just wanted a fishing expedition to embarrass large numbers of people who are not part of the case. The court rejected these arguments at the time.