The Attorney General Who Filed the Indictment Admits: He Didn't Approve Every Step

Former Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, the man who filed the indictment against Benjamin Netanyahu, testified at the prime minister's trial that not every investigative action in the cases was brought for his approval. He disclosed that he ordered a wiretap on Nathan Eshel, an associate of the prime minister, to be stopped. His words: "There were serious actions I did not approve." He also sharply criticized the investigative ploy used against state's witness Nir Hefetz, describing it as improper.

Consider what that means. The official whose signature stands on the indictment, and who was formally responsible for the investigation, has told the court under oath that investigators took significant steps without his sign-off, and that he had to halt at least one surveillance operation himself. The question is no longer only what the investigators found. It is who was steering them, and what else was done that never reached his desk.

## The Eshel wiretap and the Hefetz ploy

The two episodes Mandelblit singled out are not marginal. Eshel was a close associate of the prime minister, which makes surveillance of him a step that touches the prime minister's own circle. Hefetz was the state's witness whose cooperation became central to the prosecution. Mandelblit's criticism of the ploy used against him comes from the very person who defended the case in public for years.

The defense has its own account of the same gap. According to Haaretz, it argues that the written approvals required by procedure were never issued, and that the minutes of meetings at which approvals were allegedly given orally were redacted. That is the defense's claim, and it has to be tested in court. But Mandelblit's testimony that some actions never came to him gives that claim a footing it did not have before.

## A paper trail that doesn't exist

Mandelblit's answer was that no written documentation is required to open an investigation, and that this was also the practice in other cases involving members of Knesset. Perhaps so. But it is a thin reply when the subject is an elected prime minister and the disputed steps include wiretaps and an operation against a witness. Where the exercise of state power over an elected leader rests on verbal understandings and unrecorded meetings, the public cannot know who authorized what, and neither can the court.

This is the interpretive point, and it is a narrow one. Formal authority over the investigation sat with the Attorney General. Actual practice, by his own account, went beyond it. In a system that demands strict procedure from every elected official, the standard should apply equally to the investigators. The legitimacy of a case against a sitting prime minister depends on a clear chain of command, and the chain, as it emerges in this testimony, has gaps.

The court will decide what weight these admissions carry. But the record now shows that the Attorney General who filed the indictment did not control every step taken in its name, and that question of control belongs at the center of the discussion about this trial.