The woman who blew the whistle on a United States Jerusalem Consulate blunder said she was threatened with criminal charges of blackmail and theft by American officials if she did not return the papers she found in file cabinets she purchased from the State Department at an auction. The Consulate confirmed that it threatened to take "legal action" to retrieve the documents.
The Consulate identified Paula, the
Three years ago, Paula had paid $42 for file cabinets that the Consulate auctioned off. She called Israel National News after the Consulate called her and threatened to file criminal charges against her if she did not return the documents immediately, despite her declared intention to give them back after the story could be published in the
She had contacted Fox News, whose reporters contacted the Consulate, which then traced the auction sale back to Paula and demanded the documents before Fox or Israel National News broke the story. The official papers "should have been shredded," officials told Paula.
"I have a receipt that I bought them. These are my documents," argued Paula. "I wanted to give them back," but only after the scandal was published. Consulate spokeswoman Mica Schweitzer-Bloom replied, "The documents are
Asked if she was implying that Paula had obtained the documents by some other means, Bloom said, "I said what I said."
The Consulate sent two men, one an Israeli diplomatic security agent and the other an American coordinator. They were met by Israel National News cameras. "They saw the cameras and immediately backed off," Paula related. "They asked if I would hand over the files, and I said, 'No. Not now, but next week." She explained that the agent had not identified himself.
The next conversation was with the Israel Police, who had been called in by the Consulate and who threatened to press charges.
"They demanded and threatened to get the papers back because they wanted to be able to respond" to the story before the news services broke it, Paula wrote on her blog. She added that with the documents in the Consulate's hands, it could "spin a tale… [that] we've examined the documents.' I could almost hear some guy in a suit say, "Really, there was nothing there. No serious issue. No security breach.'
"I couldn't believe they were threatening me. I had not done anything wrong. I am not the idiot who left the files there in the first place…. They were considering that I had stolen them. I laughed when I heard this…. How exactly would I have gotten in and out of the Consulate with a stack of papers three feet high?"
With the story safely in the hands of Fox News and Israel National News, Paula agreed to return all of the papers.
"The Israeli police were kind and supportive when they took the documents," Paula concluded. "They assured me that they would tell the Americans to leave me alone. I had done my duty by protecting their documents."