The Jerusalem District Court rebuked the prosecution on Tuesday for failing to transfer certain categories of documents to the defense in the public corruption trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
As Prosecutor Yehudit Tirosh tried to argue to the court that the general law was that the documents sought could not be given to the defense because of privacy concerns of third parties involved, Judge Rivkah Friedman-Feldman interrupted and said, “Here there have been errors.”
Friedman-Feldman continued that because the prosecution had been exposed by the defense in certain areas in failing to give documents which were relevant, the court decisions Tirosh was quoting were no longer relevant.
The judge said that these decisions only protected the prosecution from transferring documents when it still had the presumption of accuracy in its own vetting process, to properly transfer documents to the defense.
For failing to transfer certain documents to the defense, she said that the prosecution had lost the presumption that the defense could trust its vetting process.
The documents in question appear to involve mainly other politicians and power-brokers who former Walla CEO Ilan Yeshua texted.
The defense wants to expose additional examples in which Yeshua intervened with news coverage in favor of other politicians and power-brokers to try to prove to the court that the former Walla CEO was a serial intervener, and that there was no Netanyahu media bribery scheme.
The prosecution has tried to prove that 315 incidents in which Netanyahu or his messengers intervened with Walla coverage were part of a unique media bribery scheme.
While the defense openly accused the prosecution of blatantly and premeditatedly concealing documents, the judges did not take this position, and merely said that it was a question of trust and competence.
Further, the court recognized that the prosecution has successfully transferred a massive volume of documents to the defense which likely make up most of the case.
Still, Judge Moshe Baram pressured Tirosh to compromise on the issue saying, “I don’t understand how stubborn you are being in a case which is so important and so critical.”
Tirosh complained that the prosecution never claimed that it had researched all other politicians and power-brokers in Yeshua’s text messages, but that this was not relevant and could be massively violate the privacy of a huge number of people.
She said that there were around 150,000 lines of content which 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.
Later Tuesday, Netanyahu lawyer Boaz Ben Zur cornered Yeshua regarding a number of instances which were inconsistent with Yeshua’s accusations that the prime minister pushed to improperly and systematically interfere with Walla to slant positive coverage.
In one case, Ben Zur showed that Walla had republished a negative story about Netanyahu from Haaretz.
While the indictment said that Netanyahu’s team tried to get Walla to take the article down, Ben Zur posited to Yeshua that Haaretz itself took the article down due to credibility issues with some of the information in it.
In other words, Ben Zur said that Netanyahu’s team was only asking Walla to fix a clear error in Haaretz, which had already fixed the original error.
Another incident Ben Zur explored related to allegations in which Netanyahu’s team pressed for Walla to publish an article criticizing then state comptroller Joseph Shapira for a report critical of Sara Netanyahu regarding “Bottlegate.”
In Bottlegate, the prime minister’s wife improperly tried to profit personally from payments for recycled bottles which had been bought by the state.
But Ben Zur showed that there were numerous Walla reports going against Sara Netanyahu for the scandal, such that the one article Netanyahu’s team got posted in favor of Sara was likely overwhelmed by the general negative coverage.
Finally, Ben Zur presented an article in which Walla did a follow-up on a negative item about Sara and the Prime Minister’s Residence Affair where most other media did not do a follow-up beyond the original item.
According to Ben Zur, this demonstrated Walla’s negative attitude toward Netanyahu – something which contradicts the idea that the site’s coverage was systematically slanted positively in the prime minister’s favor.