"No one will frighten me. I'll stay here until justice is done, and if the police record some of my conversations with Appel, I'll take aggressive measures," said Prof. Alan Dershowitz today at a press conference. Deshowitz and Adv. Eldad Yaniv are representing David Appel.
Appel is accused of bribing senior public officials and MKs, and is suspected of bribing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Minister of Industry Trade and Labor Ehud Olmert.
Dershowitz said, "In my 40 years as a lawyer, I've never such use of powers for wire-tapping in a democratic state. The only time did I saw such things was in the USSR, when I represented Natan Sharansky, and then it was for the purpose of blackmail."
Dershowitz said the more than 80,000 conversations of Appel that were tapped constituted the greatest violation of privacy he had ever encountered. Dershowitz announced that he would seek dismissal of the indictments on these grounds.
"We think that the wire-tapping in this case is a scandal that requires changing the law on wire-tapping. If anything good emerges from this case, it is the warning to Israeli citizens that they cannot be at ease in their homes, because they're exposed to wire-tapping," Dershowitz said.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on December 29, 2003