Lior Horev, who left his job as a strategic adviser to the police about a month ago (he used to be the political adviser of disgraced prime minister Ehud Olmert), estimated that the police would publish its recommendations regarding the investigations of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “within a period of two to three weeks.”
In a speech Horev delivered on the weekend at a conference of the Association of Media Consultants in Eilat, which was revealed Monday morning on Reshet Bet Radio, the PR man promised that police recommendations to the prosecution “will provide a lot of information that we currently do not know, and this will cause an earthquake here.”
In November, the police announced that Horev had asked to stop providing his PR services, a move that followed an almost unprecedented attacks on Horev by Netanyahu’s circle, attacks that included Internal Security Minister Gilad Erdan, who is in charge of the police. Erdan was especially critical of Horev’s anti-Netanyahu Facebook posts.
Netanyahu, who has been extremely belligerent in recent months, ravaged Horev with claims that he was trying “to divert public attention from his problematic employment conditions, which have cost millions of shekels to the public.”
A caustic Netanyahu blamed Horev for the wave of tendentious police leaks against him, and declared that “If there is anything that harms the public’s trust in the police, it is its bizarre employment of the political adviser Horev.”
Speaking at the conference, the former police adviser said that the conclusions about Netanyahu would lead to an election scenario by the end of May, and predicted that the Likud would go to the voter behind a different leadership.
“When the recommendations are published they will include information that is not yet known, such as the actual clauses of the indictment, details from the various sections and the list of individuals who are fully involved,” Horev said, observing that “Netanyahu is not campaigning on proving his innocence, instead he is campaigning on maintaining the integrity of the coalition. It’s a political campaign, not a legal one, and until now he has succeeded in it, boosting his coalition despite very complex police investigations [against him].”
Nevertheless, Horev believes “Netanyahu has already crossed the Rubicon where he begins to be a burden on the Likud.”
“Anyone who attributes to the prime minister even one ounce of lack of planning is doing him an injustice,” Horev said. “There is no better prepared political creature around, none tighter and more ripe than Benjamin Netanyahu.”
Horev told the Eilat conference that “the main threat facing the Likud today is a campaign of ‘We had enough of your corruption,'” the very slogan that gave Likud its first victory over the left back in 1977, “the only campaign in Israeli politics that can bridge left and right,” according to Horev, who pointed to a large-scale anti-corruption rally that had taken place Saturday night in right-leaning Jerusalem in conjunction with an identical rally in left-leaning Tel Aviv and other major cities.
“This is not negligible,” Horev said.
He told Reshet Bet Radio that the PM’s attacks on his “leaks” are baseless, seeing as the projected date for the police recommendations regarding its Netanyahu investigations had been published in all the papers last month.
“I know one thing, in contrast with your chatter every morning,” Horev rebuked his radio hosts, “It’s not recommendations by the police, but the recommendations of the State Prosecutor’s Office which accompany this case. Every police recommendation and every concluded investigation reveal all the details of said investigation, including those that had been kept from the public. It is no secret that in this case more is hidden than known, and when [the media] talked about police leaks, they qualified it by saying that a lot of information was yet to be made public.”
“The fact that you are trying to attribute to me improper acts using internal information for political considerations – this is slanderous, it is false and incorrect,” Horev pushed back.