Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took breaks in his own police interrogation sessions to speak to his legal defense team in the early days of the questioning that led to the indictment against him, prosecution attorney Yehonatan Tadmor charged in the Tel Aviv District Court on Tuesday, the first day of cross-examination.
The 36th day of the criminal trial hearings took place on the 606th day of the Israel-Hamas War. The cross-examination is the long-awaited moment for the prosecution to levy all its weight against the prime minister in the criminal cases that have altered the country.
“I am reminding you: The instruction to tell the whole truth is in effect until the end of the trial,” lead Judge Rivka Friedman-Feldman told Netanyahu.
Tadmor’s general approach seemed to be to point out inconsistencies in the prime minister’s testimony, presumably to call his reliability as a witness into question. The questions on Tuesday focused on Case 1000, or the “Illegal Gifts” affair, where Netanyahu is on trial for advancing legislation favorable to his former friend-turned-state’s witness, Hollywood producer and billionaire Arnon Milchan, while receiving gifts from him in the form of cigars and champagne worth thousands of shekels.
Zeroing in on the original summons for questioning by the police, Tadmor asked whether the police coordinated the interrogation with Netanyahu. “Yes, they did; that is what the routine is. There is no other way,” the prime minister said.
Netanyahu insisted that he even went the extra mile to clear out his schedule for those initial interrogations. However, the prosecutor cited a transcript from the first interrogation, on January 2, 2017, where Netanyahu said, in English, “[This] can’t be open-ended forever.”
“First of all, clearly I was mistaken; this has clearly gone on forever,” the prime minister quipped on Tuesday.
Tadmor insisted on those differences: Either the prime minister prepared as much as he could and cleared out his schedule, or he was so busy with his other dealings that he couldn’t have prepared properly; it could not have been both. The prosecutor referenced questioning protocols by lead Netanyahu defense attorney Amit Hadad, dated April 9, where Netanyahu stated that he knew ahead of time that the interrogations were coming.
“I didn’t think it actually had any substance at all, so I didn’t pay any mind to whether it would focus on me or anyone else,” Netanyahu said when Tadmor asked him to specify what his expectations of the interrogation were.
The prosecutor mentioned that after the second interrogation, police officers searched the room itself afterward for cigars, champagne, and jewelry. Netanyahu said he understood from the protocols presented to him on Tuesday that his lawyers must have been concerned with an unlawful search but that he didn’t remember exactly what the police asked to document.
It was in this context that he said he couldn’t remember when Tadmor insisted that evidence suggests he asked for breaks in his own interrogations to seek legal counsel from his defense team during those initial interrogations. The prime minister denied the accusation.
“Everyone has memory lapses from time to time, even me,” Netanyahu said.
The prime minister insisted that whenever he said he “didn’t remember,” he truly didn’t remember and was not trying to get out of a question or use the response to avoid telling the truth.
Tadmor stood on the differences between the prime minister’s memory and his account of his trial preparation, including that he had, on occasion, brought in folders with physical papers into the courtroom. Netanyahu said that he wouldn’t get into the folders’ contents. The prosecutor further pointed out that Netanyahu has said he “doesn’t remember” a total of 1,788 times during the interrogations of Cases 1000 and 2000.
He also pointed out instances in the trial where Netanyahu’s memory was quite accurate and “phenomenal.”Narrowing in on the specifics of Case 1000, Tadmor focused his questions on the point of origin of the Netanyahu-Milchan friendship. Netanyahu testified that it solidified in 1999, while the prosecution charged that it formed three years earlier, in 1996.
The significance of this difference is that in 1999, Netanyahu was out of politics (for a brief period until he ran again in 2002), and so his friendship with Milchan would have no bearing on him as a public official. If, as the prosecution is trying to prove, it began earlier while he was still in office, this could boost the foundation for Case 1000.
Netanyahu has said that their first meeting, though not the start of their friendship, was in 1996 with his wife, Sara, at a premiere of one of the films Milchan produced in New York. Milchan testified that the prime minister flew from Los Angeles specifically for this event, at Sara’s request. Netanyahu has said he doesn’t remember specifics.Milchan said that he bought Yair Netanyahu a Bugs Bunny doll, but that Sara insisted on a larger one.
Tadmor quoted Milchan as saying that he “ran all around New York looking for a massive Bugs Bunny doll,” he got caught in the rain, struggled to get a cab, and that when he finally arrived, Netanyahu’s security team was suspicious of him. Netanyahu said on Tuesday, “I remember there being talk of a Bugs Bunny doll; I don’t remember [the] specifics.”
Milchan testified in his interrogation that the three of them – himself, Netanyahu, and Sara – had dinner together in July 1996. At a certain point, Milchan and Netanyahu were left alone. Tadmor suggested that the dinner was so effective that Milchan decided to visit Israel at Netanyahu’s request. The prime minister responded he remembered none of the specifics.
Flight logs show that Milchan arrived in Israel on September 8, 1996, about two months after the fateful meeting. Tadmor proposed that Milchan tried to get in touch with Netanyahu but was unsuccessful. Netanyahu pointed out that, per the evidence presented, Milchan entered and left Ben-Gurion Airport several times that summer, so there is no basis to establish the early September entry as significant.
Zeroing in on the significance of the difference in the friendship origin point being in 1996 or 1999, Tadmor quoted from Netanyahu’s own testimony: “I met Milchan very close to the loss of the elections [in 1999]… I believe it was mere days after [the loss].”
Netanyahu lost the elections that took place on May 17, 1999, to Ehud Barak. He insisted that he took an honest leave of absence from politics then, convinced – along with everyone else, he noted on the witness stand – that his political career was over and that he wouldn’t be able to come back.
“When the time came, and I was asked to come back [around 2001], I initially didn’t want it,” he said. “I thought political life was behind me, and I thought I wanted to keep it behind me,” he explained.
In 2000, the Barak government fell, and special elections were called – elections for the premiership and not for the Knesset. At the time, Netanyahu wasn’t an MK and so couldn’t run.
Tadmor presented his thesis: The attempted amendment to the Basic Law: The Government, which would have allowed for the election of a prime minister who had already been prime minister to run again, was advanced with Netanyahu in mind. The bill, dubbed the “Netanyahu Law,” passed initial readings in the Knesset on December 18, 2000, in a 63-45 vote.
In the end, Ariel Sharon won those elections, and the proposed amendment never saw the light of day.
Tadmor explained that the law could have only applied to him, as he was the only relevant public figure it would have related to at the time. The question then, regarding those years, is the relevance of the friendship with Milchan at the time, around 1999, when it would have carried political consequences.
Netanyahu responded that when he wrote in his 2022 autobiography, Bibi: My Story, that in 2002, he was certain he would return to politics, it took time to understand that and in real-time, he truly believed he was out of politics for good. This was what he told his close friends, he added, including Milchan.
The prosecution’s goal is to show that essential to the nature of Milchan and Netanyahu’s relationship was Netanyahu’s power position and the governance role he held and that the fact that any types of related conversations with Milchan were being had while he was in a public post is already out of order. This is the basis of the charges of fraud and breach of trust.
Overall, the hearing was bogged down by technical objections and long waiting times.