Attorney Oded Savorai, defense attorney for the main suspect in the leaks affair from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Office, Eli Feldstein, discloses that his client believed that he was acting on behalf of the Prime Minister and on his orders, and thought he was acting lawfully.
"Yonatan Urich, the more senior supervisor has worked in the office for ten years and is close to the Prime Minister. The indictment indicates that Feldstein approached Urich about the information he had received from military intelligence and said that he needed to consult the Prime Minister on this matter. From that moment on, everything Urich said or wrote to Feldstein was perceived by the latter as being said in the name of the Prime Minister," Savorai said in an interview with Kan Reshet Bet.
He also commented on the supposedly different approach Feldstein received than the PM’s senior adviser, Jonathan Urich, who was interrogated, but not arrested. "I have no explanation for the extreme different approach between Urich and Feldstein, who was arrested and has spent weeks, and still is, in detention. The prosecutor's office did not provide any explanation. In my opinion, nobody should have been arrested in the first place. Feldstein is a junior employee, who acted on the orders of his superiors, and he definitely feels victimized."
Attorney Savorai noted that Netanyahu's disclaimer after the affair was published surprised Feldstein. "The video that the PM released improved his stance and it is true that Feldstein is a patriot who cannot possibly have acted in any way to harm state security, but the Prime Minister has no longer addressed the actual case."
Yesterday, Netanyahu issued a sharp statement following the indictment filed against Feldstein. Contrary to Netanyahu's initial claim that Feldstein was not part of his team, this time he said: "I know Eli Feldstein, he is an Israeli patriot, an enthusiastic Zionist, a captain in the reserves who made his way from the world of Torah into the army. There is no way in the world that he would have done something deliberate to endanger the security of the state."
Netanyahu emphasized that "if masked men come to you in the middle of the night, arrest you, isolate you, handcuff you, threaten you with life imprisonment if you don't give them what they want, any person can break. He could have also confessed to committing something that there is no shadow of doubt that he could ever have done it.
After all, we know this method. There's a court case, everything fades away, the truth comes out. In the meantime, there are accusations, there are explosive headlines. I read the indictment. And it's clear to me that even the military officer didn't think that I did not receive relevant documents. This is a very serious matter. I'm the Prime Minister, I need to receive important secret documents."
Netanyahu was appalled by "youngsters who are being held in worse conditions than terrorists," referring to those arrested in this affair. "Long periods of time in which they were denied access to a lawyer and their basic civil rights were violated."
"The indictment was indeed filed against them, but its goal is clear – to harm me. This hunting machine will not deter me. I want to say a final word to the Feldstein and officer’s families. It pains me that your sons are being used as pawns to hurt me. The claim that one of them deliberately acted to harm the security of the State of Israel is a wicked claim. It is fundamentally baseless."
