Emerson suggested that the FBI and the Department of Justice should be urged “to provide an exact timeline of when exactly and what exactly they provided to the Israelis following the urgent request that came in to the FBI from the Israelis hours after their soldier was believed kidnapped by Hamas on July 20-21.”
In addition, Emerson stated when he queried his source after the pushback, his source again told him that “law enforcement officials directly involved” in the matter” were specifically told in writing that “permission was withdrawn from the FBI to obtain a court order to present to Facebook to get server information” on the Israeli soldier’s Facebook page.
Emerson’s source said the FBI was told to “stand down” after having previously been given the green light. As a result of that stand down order, “no court order was ever issued to Facebook” because the prosecutors were prohibited from obtaining one, and no such server information by Facebook was ever provided to the FBI when the soldier was missing. In short, Israeli officials did not receive the Facebook information on the missing IDF soldier’s Facebook account from the FBI when they requested it.
Emerson concluded his response to the U.S. Embassy’s statement with the following chilling statement:
So someone is lying here. And its not the Israelis. And its not US law enforcement.
The terrorism expert never bothered to respond to Haaretz’s cheap innuendo and scattershot mudslinging. A particularly cheap shot, one that borders on outright defamation, is the paper’s statement that Emerson claimed the stand down order came from (then) Attorney General Eric Holder.
In fact, what Emerson wrote was that “senior law enforcement officials, on condition of anonymity, have told me that the withdrawal of authority to the FBI to retrieve the Facebook records for Israel came from the attorney general’s office.” Emerson went on to ponder who was it who gave the order, and concluded that “it had to come from someone very senior in the U.S. government.”
The Haaretz account misrepresented both what Emerson alleged as well as the content of the U.S. Embassy’s statement.
To quote Emerson, “someone is lying.”
But it is easy enough to find out what is the truth. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee should request a full accounting of the incident. That alone will finally reveal exactly who is lying.