Tel-Chai Nation

The Times of Israel has a whole article about how Benjamin Netanyahu's been able to expose wrongdoings of attorney general Avichai Mandelblit committed in the past decade, even as the latter tries to damage the former's career:

That success was accomplished in part by a relentless campaign targeting the prime minister’s chief accuser, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, and resuscitating a 2010 scandal, the so-called “Harpaz affair,” that rocked the military’s high command and saw Mandelblit investigated for obstruction.

According to a news reporter, this is how Mandelblit was involved in the affair:

So it was that on May 8, Channel 13 anchor Ayala Hasson dropped a political bombshell by revealing the alleged contents of one transcript from a September 26, 2010 phone call between Mandelblit — then the army’s top lawyer — and chief of staff Ashkenazi, in which they discuss the investigation into the affair.

“I want Mandelblit’s conversation to be publicized,” Hasson said during the broadcast of the transcript, which remains under a gag order.

She claimed Mandelblit was trying to quash the publication of the transcript, which prosecutors in 2014 classified as inadmissible eavesdropping because neither party to the call knew they were being recorded. (Phone calls and conversations are routinely and automatically recorded in the chief of staff’s office, but Ashkenazi had specifically asked his aide not to record this one. For an unknown reason, the recording was not stopped.)

“I’ve already received messages sent by Mandelblit, and he sent people to write all sorts of things,” Hasson claimed. “This is drama, a bombshell, and I expect all my colleagues [in the press] to deal with this issue, this conversation in which the Military Advocate General Mandelblit tells Ashkenazi, ‘I’ll close this for you.’ I may be breaking the law by saying this. ‘I’ll close this for you.’ In his own voice. ‘I’ll make sure my deputy closes this, I’ll instruct her. I’ll make sure that Shuki Lamberger [a state prosecutor] will be there [by Weinstein’s side] and will tilt the scales in our favor.’”

Hasson went on: “And Ashkenazi tells him, ‘The commissioner [of police] is with us and he’s looking out for us and he promised he’s looking out for us.'” [...]

Mandelblit is a tangential figure in the original Harpaz affair but lies at the heart of the story 10 years on. The reason is obvious: the affair was resurfaced by those calling into question Mandelblit’s fitness to prosecute the prime minister.

Yet the fact that the case is being revived by political interests doesn’t mean that accusations against the nation’s highest law enforcement official can be tossed aside unexamined.

So what, exactly, does Mandelblit stand accused of?

Weinstein had two main suspicions about the military advocate general over the course of the investigation.

First, he suspected that Mandelblit tried to delay the initial investigation in August 2010 by incorrectly informing Weinstein’s assistant Raz Nizri that Ashkenazi didn’t have a copy of the Harpaz document.

Mandelblit told Nizri on August 9, three days after the initial Channel 2 broadcast, that he did not know where he could obtain a copy of the document for the investigators’ use, and urged that the state prosecution reach out to Channel 2 to obtain one. The following morning, at Mandelblit’s urging, Ashkenazi called Weinstein to admit that he had a copy — and had had it for many weeks. Mandelblit claimed he did not know that fact when he spoke with Nizri the previous day.

The second suspicion, raised in part by the transcript of the September 26, 2010 phone call cited on May 8 by Ayala Hasson, is that Mandelblit allegedly interfered with the investigation by briefing a nervous Ashkenazi about its progress using information he gleaned from colleagues inside the state prosecution.

As prosecutor Toni Goldberg would write in 2014, recommending an investigation of Mandelblit, the recordings suggest the possibility that Mandelblit told Nizri “a pure lie” about Ashkenazi’s possession of the document, and also showed “the chief of staff worried at the possibility that [the investigation] will reach him, and trying to extract information [on the investigation] from Mandelblit.”

In September 2014, police recommended charging Mandelblit, along with Harpaz, former IDF spokesman Avi Benayahu and former Ashkenazi aide Erez Viner, with obstruction and breach of trust for allegedly failing to report everything they knew to investigators in a timely fashion.

In May 2015, Weinstein decided to close the case against Mandelblit, and a later ruling by the High Court of Justice concluded he had “done no wrong.” Weinstein closed the remaining cases (except Harpaz’s) in January 2016.

However, Weinstein did urge Netanyahu to reconsider Mandelblit’s position as cabinet secretary due to the questions surrounding his conduct in the affair. Netanyahu ignored this, and went on to nominate his then-ally to succeed Weinstein as attorney general.

Appointing Mandelblit as a cabinet secretary was certainly a mistake, though even if he hadn't been, chances are he'd still willingly indict Netanyahu over petty issues.

Anyway, now the way Mandelblit's case was originally closed is being looked into:

A judge overseeing complaints against the state prosecution is examining whether information pertaining to the closed case against Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit was hidden from justice officials who decided on it, according to a TV report.

Channel 13 said that in response to a complaint claiming Mandelblit’s case had been mishandled, Justice David Rozen, who holds the position of Ombudsman of the State Representatives in the Courts, wrote that his office was “looking into the claim questioning whether all relevant material was presented to the prosecution when it decided to close the case into Dr. Mandelblit.”

In recent days, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s trial set to open on Sunday, supporters of the premier have stepped up their attacks against Mandelblit, who ordered the indictment of Netanyahu on corruption charges.

On Thursday Likud minister David Amsalem ripped into Mandelblit, saying there was “no dispute among the Israeli people” that Mandelblit is “allegedly a criminal.”

If anything, Mandelblit's one more form of politician who's acted very irresponsibly, appears to have committed serious violations of lawyer's conduct, and deserves to be removed from his post, without even guarantee of a pension. He doesn't belong in the legal system, let alone politics.

Labels: Israel, Knesset, military, Moonbattery, political corruption