Tag: Benjamin Netanyahu

Benjamin Netanyahu accused of offering newspaper owner commercial favours in return for positive coverage

Israeli Prime Minister already being investigated for accepting gifts of champagne and cigars but denies any wrongdoing

According to the Independent Benjamin Netanyahu has been caught on tape offering commercial favours to an Israeli newspaper owner in return for more positive coverage, reports suggest, in a development commentators are describing as an “earthquake” in the police investigation.

The Israeli Prime Minister, who is being investigated for alleged corruption offenses, is said to have been recorded proposing a commercially beneficial deal to Arnon Mozes, the owner of one of Israel’s biggest newspapers, Yedioth Ahronoth.

He has denied any wrongdoing.

Israel’s Channel Two television station claimed Mr. Netanyahu had offered to reduce the circulation of Israel Hayom, a pro-Netanyahu newspaper that is owned by U.S. billionaire and Republican Party donor Sheldon Adelson, if Mozes instructed Yedioth Ahronoth to be more favourable towards the Prime Minister.

Cutting the circulation of Israel Hayom, which is distributed free of charge, would be of clear benefit to Mr Mozes because it is the main competitor of his newspaper in the battle for advertising revenues.

The conversation is reported to have taken place several months ago, although the precise date is unknown. Reports suggest the recording was made by Mr Mozes.

Mr Netanyahu is already under investigation for alleged corruption relating to receiving illegal gifts and donations. He has disputed the allegations and his lawyer said receiving gifts from friends is not illegal.

The Prime Minister is accused of accepting thousands of pounds worth of gifts, including cigars and champagne, from Israeli billionaire Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan. Reports suggest Mr Netanyahu lobbied US Secretary of State John Kerry on Mr Milchan’s behalf while the producer was attempting to acquire a new US visa.

Mr Netanyahu has denied the allegations. Sources said he told his ministers: “This is wrong, incessant pressure from the media on law enforcement. They release balloons and the hot air comes out of them time after time. That will be the case here too.”

Israeli news outlets quoted Mr Netanyahu’s lawyer, Yaakov Weinroth, as saying: “Any reasonable person knows that there is nothing remotely criminal involved when a close friend gives his friend a gift of cigars.”

The Israeli Prime Minister has been interviewed twice by police in the last week and is reported to have been surprised by the evidence against him.

“He didn’t expect it”, a source who knows the Prime Minister well told Haa’retz.

The evidence of the conversation between Mr Netanyahu and Mr Mozes is said to have been passed to the Israeli Attorney General, Avichai Mandelblit, by investigators early last year. It is unclear what caused the delay in interviewing Mr Netanyahu, although there are suggestions state prosecutors were not clear whether a deal of the nature allegedly proposed by the Prime Minister was actually illegal.

The conversation between the pair was reported by Israeli media to have been initiated by Mr Netanyahu in an attempt to convince the newspaper publisher not to print a story about his son, Yair. The nature of the story is unclear.

Mr Netanyahu is also accused of having accepted a accepted €1 million (£850,000) from Arnaud Mimran, a French businessman currently serving eight years in prison for committing a huge carbon-tax fraud. Mimran claimed during his trial that he had given the money to Mr Netanyahu during the 2009 Israeli election campaign – something the politician has consistently denied.

Last year a spokesperson for the Israeli Prime Minister said: “Mr. Netanyahu received no prohibited contribution from Mimran. Any other claim is a lie.”

The Prime Minister did, however, admit accepting $40,000 (£33,000) from Mimran in 2001.

Following reports last month that investigators had been given permission by Mr Mandelblit to open a formal investigation into Mr Netanyahu, a spokesperson for the Prime Minister told Haaretz the allegations were “all nonsense”.

He said: “Since Netanyahu’s victory in the last elections and even before, hostile elements have used heroic efforts to attempt to bring about his downfall, with false accusations against him and his family.

“[The allegation] is absolutely false. There was nothing and there will be nothing.”

Mr Netanyahu is not the first Israeli prime minister to be accused of corruption and his allies have pointed out that such accusations have often come to nothing. Other charges have been proven, however: Ehud Olmert, for example, is currently serving an 18-month prison sentence after being convicted of breach of trust and bribery. Mr Olmert held office from 2006 to 2009 before giving way to Mr Netanyahu.

January 8, 2017
Netanyahu said to have offered Lewinsky tapes for Pollard

New critical book on the Clinton family claims that Israel tapped White House phones, blackmailed president with recordings of intern

By Rebecca Shimoni Stoil

Jonathan Pollard, file photo, 1998 (photo credit: AP/Karl DeBlaker/File)

WASHINGTON — Israel attempted to use tapes of former US president Bill Clinton’s steamy conversations with intern Monica Lewinsky to leverage the release of Jonathan Pollard, a new book on the Clinton family’s political enterprises has claimed. In the book, titled “Clinton Inc: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine,” author Daniel Halper relies on on-the-record interviews with former officials together with a close analysis of documents termed “the Monica Files” to paint a salacious – and uncomplimentary – picture of one of the most prominent political families in the United States.

Halper reviewed hundreds of pages of documents compiled as a contingency to use in case the former intern ever was involved in legal action against Clinton.

According to the author, the documents indicate that during the Wye Plantation talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, held in Maryland in 1998, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pulled Bill Clinton aside to press for Pollard’s release.

Halper said that Israel had found new leverage to push for Pollard’s release.

“The Israelis present at Wye River had a new tactic for their negotiations–they’d overheard Clinton and Monica and had it on tape. Not wanting to directly threaten the powerful American president, a crucial Israeli ally, Clinton was told that the Israeli government had thrown the tapes away. But the very mention of them was enough to constitute a form of blackmail,” Halper wrote, adding that “according to information provided by a CIA source, a stricken Clinton appeared to buckle.”

Former US president Bill Clinton speaks at Georgetown University on Wednesday, April 30, 2014 (photo credit: Georgetown University)

Halper noted that “intelligence officials in the United States or Israel will of course not confirm on the record the extent or substance of Israeli eavesdropping,” but also cited an article published in 2000 by the magazine Insight, that claimed that Israel had “penetrated four White House telephone lines and was able to relay real-time conversations on those lines from a remote site outside the White House directly to Israel for listening and recording.”

Israel has denied such claims in the past as “outrageous.”

Pollard, a former US naval analyst, was found guilty of passing sensitive documents to Israel, and sentenced to a life sentence in prison for the offense. He remains a cause celebre in Israel, and there have been repeated efforts throughout the past twenty years to secure his release.

Halper cites seemingly corroborating information, including a contemporary New York Times article from November 1998 which reported that the two leaders had discussed Pollard’s release during the ill-fated conference and that “the Israelis had told the president something that opened up the possibility of Pollard’s release, something Clinton had explicitly ruled out during the first six years of his presidency.” The Times article noted that a White House spokesman told a reporter that Clinton was simply “newly impressed by the force of Mr. Netanyahu’s arguments.”

According to Halper, during the special investigation by Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr “Lewinsky told prosecutors that Clinton suggested that “they knew their calls were being monitored all along, and the phone sex was just a put-on.”

Halper adds to the narrative claims by the Lewinsky legal support team that “they found evidence that the British, Russians and Israelis all had scooped up the microwaves off the top of the White House.” Halper also offered as evidence the memoir of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who wrote that Russian intelligence had picked up on Clinton’s “predilection for beautiful young women.”

Clinton’s “predilection for beautiful young women,” however, was far from a state secret; it was in fact widely discussed even during Clinton’s initial presidential election campaign.

Netanyahu’s threat, according to Halper, spurred Clinton to consider action. Halper claims that Clinton brought the request before CIA director George Tenet. Tenet, however, threatened to resign his position if Pollard was released, and Clinton backpedalled on the idea.

Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky at a Los Angeles premiere in 1999 (photo credit: Monica Lewinsky image via Shuttershock.)

Halper is not the first to claim that Israel illicitly taped the steamy conversations between Clinton and Lewinsky and tried to leverage it to its advantage. In 1999, UK author Gordon Thomas claimed that the Mossad had collected some 30 hours’ worth of phone sex conversations between Lewinsky and Clinton and was using them to blackmail the US or to protect a deeply-embedded mole in the White House.

Thomas also claimed that the Mossad was behind the deaths of Princess Diana, Robert Maxwell, William Buckley, and the 241 Marines killed in a 1983 barracks explosion in Lebanon. At the time, Netanyahu’s spokesman described Thomas’s allegations as “unmitigated drivel.”

Halper, the online editor of the Weekly Standard, says that he “was well aware that the former (and perhaps future) first family and its massive retinue of loyalty enforcers, professional defamers and assorted gadflies would rue my intent to examine the real Clintons” and had been warned “of what to expect from the Clinton PR team.”

In a piece that he wrote for the Huffington Post late Tuesday, Halper said that all of the warnings he had received about clever steps to downplay the impact of his book had proven true.

Copies of Halper’s book were sent out in PDF form to hundreds of reporters days before the book’s official release by a previously unknown individual, in what Halper suggests was an effort to reduce the impact of the book’s release.

timesofisrael.com, 23 July 2014

July 26, 2014
Israeli PM makes an arrogant joke about his family scandal on TV show

In this 2013. file photo, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu listens to his wife Sara during a meeting with the Roman Jewish Community at the Great Synagogue in Rome. A former employee at the official residence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has filed a lawsuit alleging he was abused by the Israeli leader’s wife, Sara.

According to Associated Press Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has shown a rare light side by appearing on a popular TV satirical show on which he joked about the latest scandal tainting Israel’s first family.

Last week, a former member of his housekeeping staff, Meni Naftalli, filed a lawsuit claiming he was mistreated and verbally abused by Netanyahu’s wife, Sara. In one instance, Naftali alleged Sara Netanyahu had called him at 3 a.m. to complain that he had bought milk in a plastic storage bag instead of a carton.

On Sunday night’s “State of the Nation” TV show, Netanyahu asked the panel for a cappuccino with milk from a bag, in a joking reference to the allegation.

June 2, 2014