Unrestrained persecution? The State Attorney's Office today (Thursday) submitted a notice to the Tel Aviv District Court amending the security indictment filed against Eli Feldstein and reservist Ari Rosenfeld, for stealing secret and sensitive information from Military Intelligence systems and publishing it in the German newspaper Bild.
The amended indictment includes the addition as a defendant of Yonatan Urich, who serves as the Prime Minister's personal communications advisor, the amendment of the facts chapter and the respective enactment provisions, and the addition of prosecution witnesses.
Urich is charged with the offenses of providing secret information with the intent to harm state security, providing secret information, possessing secret information, and destroying evidence.
The filing of the indictment was approved by the Legal Advisor to the Government and the State Attorney.
At the same time, the prosecution is requesting that restrictive conditions be imposed on Orich until the end of the proceedings, including complete removal from the Prime Minister's Office and removal from any security facility or place where confidential information may be held; a ban on direct or indirect contact with anyone involved in the case, including witnesses and suspects.
Prime Minister Netanyahu has been added to the list of prosecution witnesses, which means that Urich will not be able to contact him as part of the indictment - and therefore, will not be able to lead the Likud election campaign.
The indictment was filed for stealing secret and particularly sensitive information from Intelligence Agency systems, including raw intelligence, and subsequently publishing it in foreign media outlets, after censorship had categorically disallowed its publication, with the aim of influencing public discourse on the handling of the abductees' issue.
According to the indictment, Urich and Feldstein used highly classified information from the military system to influence media discourse. In this context, Feldstein and Urich worked to publish a piece of news in the German newspaper Bild, knowing that it was secret and despite being aware that military censorship did not permit its publication in Israel, while taking a real risk of harming vital security interests.
In addition, Feldstein, with prior coordination and with Urich's consent, forwarded information he received from Rosenfeld to other, unauthorized parties.
""The actions of Urich, Rosenfeld and Feldstein led to the discovery of the existence of a secret intelligence tool, its capabilities and the methods of its use. The public disclosure of the secret information could cause real damage to the security interests of the State of Israel, mainly in the field of intelligence gathering and the disclosure of intelligence sources, through which human lives are saved, as it could reveal missions, capabilities, methods of operation and classified means used by the intelligence community in various arenas," the statement from the Attorney General's Office said.
According to the prosecutor's office, the day after Feldstein and Rosenfeld's arrest, Urich changed his cell phone and deliberately avoided transferring the correspondence that was on his previous cell phone, in order to prevent him from being questioned as evidence.
The investigation into the affair was conducted by Lahav 433 at the Israel Police.
Political commentator Amit Segal responded to the demand for Urich's removal from the Prime Minister's Office: "Levin, Elkin and Erdan were witnesses in Netanyahu's cases. Like them, so were employees in the Prime Minister's Office and those in the Likud. It was never required that Netanyahu be banned from speaking with them for years - just not to talk about the content of the testimony.".
""Trust in Bahar Meara and her team regarding impartiality in the political sphere is not at its peak after the series of failures in the High Court. When she actually seeks to remove the key figure in the Likud campaign through the most extraordinary means, it is puzzling (or not).
""Netanyahu's subpoena is the most unusual of exceptions, given the fact that he was hardly asked about the affair in his testimony.".
