Who are Netanyahu’s defense lawyers for his bribery trial? – profile

The prime minister has a wide array of lawyers in and out of his defense team.

By YONAH JEREMY BOB
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wearing a mask, stands inside the courtroom as his corruption trial opens at the Jerusalem District Court May 24, 2020. (photo credit: REUTERS/RONEN ZEVULUN)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wearing a mask, stands inside the courtroom as his corruption trial opens at the Jerusalem District Court May 24, 2020.
(photo credit: REUTERS/RONEN ZEVULUN)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had a wide array of lawyers in and out of his defense team in recent years.
Lawyer Jacob Weinroth, a titan of the legal profession, was Netanyahu’s top general until 2018, when he died.
At early stages, Jacques Chen was part of the legal team, but he had to resign when he started to represent Shaul Elovitch, another major defendant in Netanyahu’s cases.
Other senior lawyers who were on the team for a period of several months or more at various times were: Navot Tel Tzur, Yossi Ashkenazi and Ram Caspi.
The only lawyer who was part of Weinroth’s team from the beginning and has remained by Netanyahu’s side throughout is Amit Hadad.
Hadad, still under 35, is 20-30 years younger than many of the other lawyers who have represented Netanyahu, but is considered one of the country’s rising legal stars.
Though he is still a critical part of the legal team, the lead lawyer when Netanyahu’s trial opened on May 24 was Micha Fettman.
Fettman has 33 years under his belt as a lawyer, with 12 as a prosecutor and 21 as a defense lawyer.
He represented former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s chief of staff, Shula Zaken, in the first public corruption trial in Jerusalem, initially winning a partial acquittal.
The veteran lawyer has also represented former ministers Avigdor Liberman, Avigdor Kahalani, former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s son, Gilad and former top adviser to prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Sheves.
Despite a broad media narrative that Netanyahu will be convicted in one or more of the three cases he faces, Fettman is strongly optimistic.
Sources close to Fettman recall that he has been involved in cases like that of the Jacque Yulzari Company. There the media narrative was set that the company, its supervisors and the bus driver would be convicted in the deaths of 17 in a tragic road accident in 1999.
In contrast, Fettman went through the evidence piece by piece.
He reasoned with the Nazareth court judges until, little by little, he convinced them in 2006 that the correct decision based on the available evidence was an acquittal.
At the time of the acquittal, he told the media that even as the court could not declare a clear party responsible for the accident (part of the responsibility was officials who failed to report on a dangerous substance that had been left on the road), justice had been done by acquitting innocent men.
Similarly, Fettman, along with top lawyer and former top adviser to Ariel Sharon, Dov Weissglass, obtained an acquittal for Kahalani in 2001.
In that case, he convinced the court that the police had overstepped their authority with aspects of the wiretapping activities they performed.
Fettman has a talent for honing in on the story underlying the story. He can sense contradictory tensions and complex motivations which often encapsulate how humans act far more than the simple black and white narratives which fit in short headlines.
This was part of what helped him find problematic moves by law enforcement in the Yulzari and Kahalani probes.
These instincts may also lead to finding potential issues in the Netanyahu probe (his co-lawyer in the case, Amit Hadad, has repeatedly attacked the process by which law enforcement drafted two key state’s witnesses as problematic.)
So far, Fettman has been effective for Netanyahu, having convinced the Jerusalem District Court to push off substantive issues from the May 24 hearing until July 19.
Further, it appears that the court may grant his request to put off calling witnesses until January or spring 2021, despite the prosecution’s wish to start calling witnesses in August.
This would be a boon for Netanyahu as he could likely ride out his full 18-month term without getting close to a verdict.
If Fettman has a firm, but gregarious aura, Hadad presents a deadly serious persona even behind closed doors and at most may drop in a smile as part of a sarcastic attack on his opposition.
When representing Sara Netanyahu early on in the Prepared Foods Affair, he made public appearances aggressively dismissing the charges as jumping on the prime minister’s wife over ordering cheap cafeteria style meals.
He has also gone on the attack when representing Netanyahu and his advisers Ofer Golan and Yonatan Urich.
During the October 2019 pre-indictment hearings for Netanyahu before the prosecution, Hadad proclaimed to the media, “we are surprising them,” with new legal arguments and perspectives on disputed facts that the prosecution did not expect.
In December 2019, Hadad appealed to the Supreme Court against the police for trying to hack Netanyahu’s advisers’ cellphones after they were accused of witness intimidation.
Hadad said that the police must not get away with having abused Netanyahu’s advisers’ rights.
Moreover, he said the Supreme Court should penalize the police for slowly accessing four separate cellphones in the investigation over several days.
He added that since there is a clear pattern of the police ignoring procedure and since the police had enough evidence to conclude their probe, they should not be allowed to fully search the cellphones in question.
Currently, there is a second appeal regarding evidentiary disputes regarding Netanyahu’s advisers before the Supreme Court.
In the past, Hadad has given other examples to The Jerusalem Post of major cases he was involved in where he believes the public and the media wrongly condemned someone too quickly.
Two famous cases involved Boaz Harpaz as well as former defense minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer.
Ben-Eliezer was indicted in December 2015 for charges of bribery, money-laundering, fraud, breach of public trust and tax offenses, but died in August 2016.
The prosecution initially accused Ben-Eliezer of laundering millions of shekels by buying real estate, funneling it to bank accounts belonging to relatives, and through the use of currency exchange businesses. He was also accused of taking bribes from a series of associates for advancing their interests.
In the media, Ben-Eliezer was mostly written off as destined to go to jail for years for serious bribery convictions had he not died first.
However, Hadad said that in the cases against defendants accused of bribing Ben-Eliezer which went forward, a large portion of the original charges fell by the wayside.
This means Ben-Eliezer’s legal situation, had he lived, would have been much better than portrayed by the media.
The other example, Boaz Harpaz, was a midlevel retired IDF officer accused of forging a document which led to a political war between then-IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi and then-defense minister Ehud Barak.
The Harpaz Affair, named for Boaz Harpaz, shook the defense establishment for six years, and recently has been used by Netanyahu as a cudgel against Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit, who was involved in a side aspect of the case.
Many in the public and the media at one-point suggested Harpaz would get a serious jail term for serious crimes, but he was eventually only sentenced to community service.
Hadad’s point was that the legal nuances which led to reducing much of the Ben Eliezer and Harpaz charges are missed by much of the public and the media.
Interestingly, Hadad views representing powerful criminal defendants the same as his volunteer representation of many of the victims of polygamist cult-leader Goel Ratzon.
In July 2016, Ratzon was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a range of sex and financial crimes committed against 21 “wives,” who were part of his cult over a period of about 30 years, and with whom he had more than 40 children.
Hadad said that helping one of Ratzon’s victims “get her house back” after Ratzon had forced her to give it up and to “see the happiness from this special woman…this feeling was second to none.”
In addition, he said that he never sees just a guilty, innocent or victimized person.
Rather, he sees a human being who has a right to be treated fairly and given the benefit of the doubt, whether Ratzon’s victims or the prime minister.
There have been a range of negative media reports about Fettman and Hadad’s tactics for Netanyahu or actions for past clients, but each of them are used to the spotlight.
Still, even with some big victories under their belts, going up against prosecutor Liat Ben-Ari and her team who took down Olmert will be an uphill battle.


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