Surgical strike on Olmert
Slew of investigations faced by prime minister irreversibly damaged his image
Ehud Olmert is a has-been. His career is finished. His fellow politicians know it, the foreign leaders he will be meeting in Paris Sunday know it, and the attorneys and police officers who manage his investigations know it.
The only one who refuses to know it is Ehud Olmert. By doing so, he is only making his suffering worse. The question of which incriminating evidence against him has accumulated, if at all, is still open – but he must realize that the damage to his public stature is irreversible. He must end his term as prime minister.
PM Probe
Moments before leaving for Paris, prime minister slams fresh police investigation against him. 'The attempts to link my family to this affair are despicable,' he says
If so, in exchange I propose to postpone all the investigations pending against you to the end of your term. The material is all there. The witnesses are not running away. Nothing terrible will happen if we wait for two months.
At the same time, today I shall appoint a special investigator who will ask the six premiership candidates, Tzipi Livni, Meir Sheetrit, Shaul Mofaz, Avi Dichter, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Ehud Barak, to submit a detailed declarations of all their businesses, earnings, and accounts. We won’t have enough time to look into everything, but we shall hold a preliminary probe ahead of the elections, not after them. At least two of them, three perhaps, will have to carefully think whether they still want to be candidates.
This way, perhaps we will not be averting the next witch-hunt, but alt least we shall be contributing something to government stability.
Mazuz can’t afford another failure
For the second time in Israel’s history, an attorney general shall be ousting a prime minister. The comparison between the two cases is fascinating: In 1977, it was discovered that the-PM Rabin was holding a bank account in the United States, in violation of the law at the time. The offence was technical and minor. The source of the money was legitimate. Yet despite this, then-Attorney General Aharon Barak forced the prime minister to resign.
Barak acted out of a sense of power. He was basing his move not only on his position, but also, and perhaps mostly, on his personal authority. Did he lower the level of corruption in the country with Rabin’s dismissal? Not for sure. Yet what is certain is that he gave his successors unusual political power; the attorney general became the top judge. The fate of the government and its ministers was entrusted in his hands.
Menachem Mazuz is far from being Aharon Barak. He enjoys lesser authority. It is not his intoxication with power that leads him to oust the prime minister, but rather, the opposite – lack of confidence. The system sustained too many failures during his term in office. It cannot afford another failure.
Therefore, it investigates Olmert as if it is obsessed. Six different investigations are being conducted against him, some of them serious, other ones dubious. The attorney general has not been able to reach a decision on any one of them.
Technical malfunction
Yet what the police investigators and attorneys cannot do on the job, they do with biased leaks. They are leaking both the truth and lies. The rights of those under investigation are brutally trampled over.
The investigators and attorneys are behaving like athletes who really want to take part in the Olympics. The problem is that they aren’t fast enough or strong enough. Yet they want to achieve the minimum scores so badly that they are tempted to use banned drugs.
For example, look at the latest investigation involving Olmert’s travel expenses. Friday evening, the State Prosecutor’s Office issued a statement that revealed details of the investigation. Olmert is suspected of charging multiple non-profit groups for the same trips. The possibility that a person who serves as prime minister submitted false invoices and took public money to his own pocket is nauseating. Ok, we were shocked. But we did not see any invoices; not even one.
The prime minister headed to Paris Saturday night, surrounded by photographs as usual. Yet for the first time in many years, the prime minister’s photo boarding the plane was not sent to the press. The Government Press Office said this was a result of a technical malfunction. In the prime minister’s eyes, everything that is happening at this time may be a technical malfunction. Yet the rest of the nation views it different.
