Leaked Police Interrogation Footage of Netanyahu, and How He Cowers Behind War to Keep Power

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0:34Alex Kivney, thank you very much for doing this. So for all the years that Benjamin Netanyahu has been in the American media, I think there's very little sense in the U.S. about his domestic troubles in Israel. We keep hearing he's been charged and the President of the United States keeps saying he needs to be pardoned. you've made this documentary that explains what is at the core of this controversy like what are the charges what is he accused of doing did he do it so i'm going to stand back and just let you if you would outline what benjamin antonio has been accused of doing well in roughly speaking you'd you'd say it was bribery or you'd say it was corruption i mean and and i can detail the charges.

1:21This is a film that I produced and was directed by Alexis Bloom. And back in 2023, I got a strange message on Signal from somebody who said that they had all of the police interrogation videos from the Benjamin Netanyahu investigation. And they had been investigating Netanyahu since 2016 for charges of corruption, that is to say, trading on his position as prime minister to get money in all sorts of favors, jewelry for his wife, very expensive Cuban cigars, hundreds of millions of dollars in forgiveness of certain loans in order to be able to get favorable coverage on a news website called Walla.

2:14So it was a pretty interesting case and it went from the very small meaning you know very expensive cuban cigars from a a rather famous movie producer named arnon milchan to something very big which is effectively a 250 million dollar financial arrangement in exchange for coverage good coverage for netanyahu so so it's a pretty big deal what do the so you got the tapes where let me just ask to the extent you can say, where did they come from? I can't say where they came from. I can't say anything about the source. But what I can say is we got over a thousand hours of tapes. And these were interviews with Netanyahu himself by the police, also Netanyahu's wife, Sarah, his son, Yair, also with a number of key people close to Netanyahu, for example, near Hefetz, his former head of communications.

3:11Sheldon Adelson, who we know in this country as a billionaire, now deceased, his wife Miriam Adelson, Arnon Milchan, a famous Israeli businessman, arms dealer, who also became a very famous motion picture producer. So it was a kind of an extraordinary array of evidence. And while some of this evidence had been published in Israel in written form, nobody had seen the tapes and the tapes are very revealing particularly for Netanyahu because Netanyahu tries to cultivate this this image of the grand vizier the the great statesman of Israel here you see a rather petty corrupt man desperately lying to save his skin and and his wife who is a deeply uh entitled woman you know trying to claim that so what if we got stuff I mean we deserve it because we were doing so much for the nation and for the world.

4:07And his son, Yair, who is also extremely entitled, screaming at the police, yelling, you know, you're like the Stassi. So it was an illuminating look at the actual character behind the facade, sort of like that moment in The Wizard of Oz where, you know, Toto pulls back the curtain and the wizard says, please pay no attention. And it was really revealing. If you can, and I think people watching this will watch the film, but I'm interested in your take, having watched a thousand hours of this, what is it, can you go more deeply into what do you think it reveals about the prime minister and his character?

4:45Well, I think it reveals, I think, a kind of deep-seated corruption, a willingness to do almost anything to save his skin. I think that he became possessed after the election in 2015 of a sense of enormous arrogance, that he was now the man. Because he came back from what seemed to be a defeat to an enormous victory, and now he had this sense of entitlement. uh interestingly then he began to um uh you know cash in on that entitlement and he was caught um but what happened then was that rather you know as he heard the sound of the possibility of the jail door slamming shut on him he began to start to do things that really took uh israel in a very dark direction.

5:39The first thing he tried to do was to essentially fix the Department of Justice. He tried to engage in a series of, this is before October 7th, he tried to engage in a series of reforms of the judicial system, which would weaken the power of the judiciary in Israel. most likely because that would undermine the case against him that's the most direct likely outcome but the other thing was that by this time he had formed a government with an extremely right-wing coalition with a guy named um ben gavir who is a head of national security and a guy named smotrick who's a is a head of the um of finance they are extremely right-wing extremely anti-Palestinian, and their designs were to expand illegal settlements in the West Bank.

6:38And in some cases, while it was already a dire situation for Palestinians on the West Bank, nevertheless, there would be judicial orders which would sometimes get in the way of that. That was another aspect of this. Well, when Netanyahu tried to fix the judiciary, the country rose up. And it was in a huge uproar over these changes, which were fundamentally undermining Israel's democracy. Not too long after, of course, there was the terrible attack by Hamas on October 7th, which shocked Israel. um what people began to learn was that for years netanyahu again i think as part of the way he sees the world and as part of a kind of more generalized sense of corruption had been trying to modulate the relationship with hamas and indeed had been allowing millions and millions of dollars to flow to hamas from qatar um sometimes in bags of cash traveling through Israel.

7:45And the reason he was doing that was to undermine the Palestinian authority on the West Bank in order to be able to allow for his right-wing coalition to get more and more territory via settlement. So all sorts of strange, corrupt deals were happening. But then I think that post 10-7, which was a terrible moment, I don't want to minimize it in any way, it was a horrific attack. And we show some of that attack in the film. But he then launched an attack on Gaza, which was so beyond any sense of proportionality. Now we have at least over 75 ,000 people dead. Of course, now we have an Iran war and a Lebanon war and so forth and so on.

8:33But one of the goals, I'm convinced, and not me, but all of the witnesses who are, you know, very reputable members of the security establishment in Israel in the film. indicate that part of the enduring ferocity, savagery of the war was due to becoming a wartime president who could then not be prosecuted or successfully prosecuted for the crimes he had committed. The trial, not only the investigation, but now there's been a trial, the trial is still ongoing. This is 10 years after the investigation started. So long as he's the commander-in-chief and he's waging war, how dare you attack the president?

9:21So in a way, this kind of venal, personal corruption that starts with cigars and pink champagne, for which they had code names, and then evolves into corrupt deals relating to the media, becomes a mechanism by which slowly but surely the corruption got greater and greater and greater until it became a moral corruption in which the world is now engulfed. We've got a new partner. It's a company called Cowboy Colostrum. It's a brand that is serious about actual health. And the product is designed to work with your body, not against your body. It is a pure and simple product, all natural. Unlike other brands, Cowboy Colostrum is never diluted.

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11:53So don't settle, go to joyandblokes.com slash Tucker, use the code Tucker for 50 % off your lab work and 20 % off all supplements. That's joyandblokes.com slash Tucker. Use the code Tucker. 50 % off labs, 20 % off supplements. Join blokes. Get your edge back. You're first. There were people in Israel in public right after October 7th, which clearly was committed by Hamas and was clearly terrible. I agree with that. I want to be clear. But there were a bunch of people, including people I knew who said, wait a second, you know, this couldn't have happened if the government of Israel had really tried to prevent it.

12:36Okay. So there's something very strange about the ability of Hamas fighters on motorbikes and gliders and on foot coming across the most heavily guarded border in the world and the delay in the response of the IDF to this, like, what is this? And it's almost forbidden to say that, as you know, in the United States, but tell me what people you spoke to in Israel now believe about that attack. I should point out that when you say I spoke to, I mean, the person who directed the film was Alexis Bloom. I got the footage. Alexis Bloom. Of course. I'm asking you to speak for the film. Sure, sure, sure.

13:10No problem. In any event, I think there were a lot of people who felt that a proper investigation into what Netanyahu knew about the possible impending attack by Hamas should be commenced. However, that got rolled under the carpet because of the fact that he's now in a war with Hamas. I mean, Hamas doesn't really have an air force. You can't properly call it a war. But I think there was a lot of talk about how much and what advance warning Netanyahu may have had about the October 7th attacks. I've never seen prima facie evidence of that fact, but there's certainly a lot of talk about it in Israel.

13:56Okay, so it's not just crazy people on the Internet who think it's possible or likely that Benjamin Netanyahu knew this was coming, had some sense it was coming, didn't do his best to prevent the damage within Israel. that because he was in this politically tough spot and the ensuing war would take the attention off him and allow him a pass on the charges. Is that a fair summation? I personally think it may be a bit too cynical to think that he literally engendered an attack in order to counterattack. But I do think that he had deluded himself in part because he thought of the world as a series of deals.

14:33He had diluted himself into the idea that he had manipulated Hamas and all the money that was flowing to Hamas, you know, wasn't going to go to weapons and preparing an attack. I mean, he kept saying, what was the phrase? It's in the film, that he could control the height of the flames by the introduction of money. or and he also that sounds right father when he's talking to the police he says keep your friends close and your enemies closer as if he was the don and sort of able to manipulate events but he clearly was not able to that seems like a smart interpretation to me and of course i don't know but that that sounds that sounds plausible entirely plausible so then october 7th happens i think most israelis are genuinely shocked that it happened and they're horrified and a lot of the world is genuinely shocked and horrified, including me.

15:29But then this war begins in Gaza or this leveling of Gaza, this mass murder in Gaza, and then it expands to a lot of the regions in the Levant and now into Iran. Is it too cynical to think that one of the motives there from the prime minister is to just keep moving forward because if he stops, he gets arrested? well it may be a little bit too cynical uh i mean i mean baby netanyahu's wanted to attack iran for years in fact they did another film about that subject called zero days um so but but i do think that once the momentum of war began and and and i would say also that to some extent the momentum of war began to have a certain popular impact um among the populace in israel too that now there was an opportunity to go after more enemies.

16:28And it had the byproduct, of course, of as long as there's war, as long as there's permanent war, Netanyahu will never be held to account. So once again, I think it may be a bit too cynical to say he attacked Iran so he wouldn't go to jail. But I think it had been a longstanding desire for Netanyahu to want to really go after Iran. And now both once he'd started the war in Gaza, but also, I think, with the Trump administration coming to power in 2024, suddenly he had an opportunity. Yeah, that sounds right to me. So how has he regarded the prime minister in Israel? It's hard to know if you're not there.

17:12What's your view? I agree. I think it's fair to say that there is a robust group of people who are vehemently anti-Netanyahu and believe he's destroying Israel and destroying democracy in Israel and indeed making the country a pariah worldwide. I would agree with that point of view. However, I would also say that war has a peculiar effect on people and can engender a sense of nationalism, which I believe is rising. Not only a sense of nationalism, but that nationalism undergirded by the undertow of victimhood. So Netanyahu is very much using that. And I think it would be a mistake to think that he's unpopular.

18:03We'll find out very soon. you know, when elections happen. But I think that as long as you're waging war, people tend to rally around the commander in chief, which I think is both a cynical ploy by Netanyahu and also a longstanding goal of his to be able to wage war across the Levant and expand Israel's power and influence. Did you get a sense of his religious views? I think if Netanyahu is well honestly he's pretty american and western and secular but in his i mean the first statement he gave after the war in iran began he began with today's torah portion and he's been saying things like that a lot do do you have an opinion on what he thinks what his spiritual views are it's hard for me to say i mean i i think that to some extent And I see him more as a politician.

19:00Now, I don't have access to what his real views are, but when you hear politicians quoting scripture, in effect, it tends to be for the reason that they're trying to undergird their policies with the force of God. um that's a it's an old script and i think netanyahu knows very well that it's an effective one that would be my my gut i really don't know or have any insight into what he believes when he's alone in a room what his relationship is with god yeah well we can't know but it does seem like the country is changing fast um that's my perception as a visitor it's not a good it's not a good thing.

19:48And we can also see that this hard right-wing faction has wreaked havoc on the West Bank. And settlements are expanding apace in a really reprehensible way. There's lots of, you know, it's sort of out of the public eye, but that I think was one of the goals from the beginning, you know, with his reckoning with Hamas and all of this stuff. But also, you know, because Netanyahu, in order to stay in power, another corrupt deal, he makes a deal with a hard right and then goes very hard right. It's not like he was ever a peacenik, but now he goes very, very, very hard right. And at the great expense of the lives and livelihoods of many Palestinians.

20:39Yeah. I don't know if it's right or not. I'm on the right and I hate this. I hate violence. And there were reports this morning of, in the Israeli press, of mass rapes of Palestinians by settlers in the West Bank. So like, I think that's just... The degree of violence by settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank is rapacious. I mean, it's... And it goes on day after day after day after day. Ranchers built America, feeding our country for over 250 years through droughts and wars and recessions and pandemics and anything else that happened didn't matter to them because they had to come through and they did.

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22:40fiber connected to the premises by coaxial cable. Actual speeds vary. So since you're the producer of this film, do you mind if I ask you about your experience? So you come into possession of a thousand hours of tape, which is not public. You're not saying understandably exactly how you got it, but it's real. I mean, probably a lot of people don't want you to make that into a documentary and air it. So what was your experience of that? That's fair to say. And indeed, when, you know, we tried to produce the film in secret, I had some able helpers. I mean, not only was Alexis Bloom an extraordinary, talented woman directing it, but in Israel, you know, we were aided by a guy named Raviv Drucker, who is a noted journalist in Israel and helped us to contextualize some of this stuff.

23:32But we had a sense that we had to keep it secret while we were making it. And then we sort of launched an event at the Toronto Film Festival in 2024. It was a work in progress because we felt at that moment this kind of thing needed to be seen. Now, Netanyahu himself went to court in Israel to try to stop the premiere of the film at Toronto. He was utterly unsuccessful. But I should note also that the American media played a kind of unseemly role in the sense that we went to NBC first and we were going to do a rather big piece in advance of the premiere in Toronto. And then we were told at the last minute that, oh, NBC has decided that we're not going to do the story because it would probably upset Netanyahu and that would limit our access to the prime minister.

24:32They said that? Yes, they said that to me. That's correct. Why? Not what I would regard as a deeply courageous move by a journalistic organization. Yeah, I mean, I think journalistic is probably too strong. But wow, I'm just, I mean, I've worked at that company. I'm just surprised that they were as blunt as they were to you. What did you say? I was just shocked. I mean, because I was ready to, I was ready to do an interview. I believe it was Andrea Mitchell. You know, I was shocked. And, you know, part of the reckoning was it was both both craven and bad journalistically, but also sort of corrupt in the sense that they suggested that they might have gone with it if they themselves had discovered the police interrogation videos.

25:27But they weren't going to risk their capital with Netanyahu for something that they themselves didn't discover. The idea of the public good or the public reckoning didn't seem to be part of the equation. It was a very disappointing moment. Probably not that surprising. I mean, in general, the coverage of what happens there is non-existent or not consistent with reality in the United States. But did you pause at all before embarking on this? Once you got the tapes, did you think maybe it's not a good idea long term for me to get involved in something like this? No. I felt it was really important because those tapes, once I was able to verify them and to understand them better, I felt they shed a really important light on a vital figure in world politics, and that's in Yahoo.

26:28And so it seemed to me that that's my job. And when I find out important information about public figures that shed light on wars and how we reckon with the world, that it's my job to get that story out. So I actually didn't pause, but it took a while to figure out because I'm not a network. You know, I'm an independent filmmaker and it took a while to figure out how to raise the money, how to and also to do it in secret so that nobody would subpoena the tapes or, you know, prevent me from from getting to the end. So, you know, Alexis and I had to proceed, you know, for some time in secret. But, you know, it was, I felt it was really important material and really important to get it out.

27:24Good for you. How hard was it to raise the money? It was hard, but not, as it turns out, impossible. So, and there were a number of people who also, once they were able to see a little bit of what we had, came forward. and helped. So yeah, we were able to do it. I mean, it was, but it was, it was mining a different source. It wasn't the traditional way where you go to your bureau chief and you say, please give me the resources of the corporation and let's go get this story. No, it definitely isn't. So we've tried from the beginning just to advertise businesses that have like-minded values, businesses that make things or provide services that we actually use, that seem like decent people that don't hate us or you.

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28:53Use promo code Tucker to get a free phone with free activation, free shipping, and a free gift with every new line of service. Visit charitymobile.com slash Tucker. Do you expect any consequences going forward? I mean, presumably you hope to make other films. Will this make it harder? I don't know. I think that we live in a moment where people all over the world, including in this country, are making it difficult for independent voices to be heard. So, yeah, I reckon with that. But I feel like even though, and I'm glad TCN is showing BB files on its network, and it has had pretty good international distribution.

29:40The distribution here has been somewhat handicapped. but um can you tell us about that what i mean it seems like um even if i disagreed with your views which i i don't know that i do i don't think i do but i i would just stop at you have relevant information that's real about one of the key players in global politics so like that alone justifies this in my opinion and so the idea that you would have distribution problems in the united States is a little scary. And I'd love to know more about what those problems are. I think one of the problems is that the market in general is controversy averse.

30:22You know, you have a number of streamers who don't want to upset their viewers. You have news organizations, which in this case, as I've documented, you know, also didn't want to be on the wrong side of an issue that might upset people? I mean, it seems to me that the job, you know, because I do think that four years ago, roughly speaking, you know, if I had gone out into the marketplace with the BB files, there would have been a bidding war. But now it's kind of just the opposite. It's like, we don't want to do anything that might upset people because then they won't buy sneakers or they won't buy iPads.

31:04You know, so that's part of it. And I think part of it is that controversy has become problematic and also powerful political figures are exerting influence on broadcasting outlets to toe the line. And sometimes if you're not, you know, you don't have a regular show, you don't get a hearing. So it's a problem. It's a really big problem. I think the, you know, while I'm critical of the mainstream press, particularly in this instance, you know, I believe strongly in the idea of a free press. Yes. And I'm deeply upset about the way not only Netanyahu did in Israel, but the way the Trump administration is trying to suppress a free press in this country.