Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Chief of Staff, Tzachi Braverman, has been summoned for questioning by the police's Lahav 433 unit.
Braverman, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s chief of staff, was summoned for questioning by the police.
Braverman’s summons follows remarks made last month by Eli Feldstein, Netanyahu’s former media adviser, in an interview on Kan 11.
In addition to Braverman, Feldstein himself is also expected to be questioned, and police may conduct a confrontation between the two.
In the interview on Kan 11’s program “Yihiye Tov" (“It Will Be Good"), Feldstein claimed that Braverman attempted to obstruct the investigation into the leak of a classified document to the German newspaper Bild.
Feldstein said that Braverman, who was recently appointed ambassador to the United Kingdom, summoned him late at night to the Kirya military complex, to a parking lot on level minus four, and told him that there was an investigation being conducted by the Information Security Department (Machbam). According to Feldstein, Braverman “showed me a list of five or six people and asked if I recognized anyone there. I told him ‘no.’ He told me there was an investigation and that they were checking whether I was connected to it, whether we were connected to it, and added, ‘I can shut this down.’"
According to Feldstein, he shared this information with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s adviser Yonatan Urich-whom he described as “my boss"-during that same nighttime meeting. “Just as I shared everything with him, I told him that the chief of staff told me there was a Machbam investigation. Tzachi knew that there was an investigation within the IDF that reached all the way to the Prime Minister’s Office. He chose to meet me, in the middle of the night, in a parking lot at the Kirya."
Feldstein also described this meeting during his Shin Bet interrogation, but at the time did not mention Braverman by name, saying only that it involved “a senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office." Braverman, for his part, denies that the meeting ever took place.