Alex Gibney

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 image of the grand vizier, the great statesman of Israel.

Here you see a rather petty, corrupt man desperately lying to save his skin.

And his wife, who is a deeply entitled woman, you know, trying to claim that, so what if we got stuff?

I mean, we deserve it because we're doing so much for...

for the nation and for the world.

And his son, Yair, who is also extremely entitled, screaming at the police, yelling, you know, you're like the Stasi.

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.

Well, 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.

um because uh he came back from what seemed to be a defeat to an enormous victory and now he he had this sense of entitlement uh interestingly then he began to um

you know, cash in on that entitlement, and he was caught.

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 Israel in a very dark direction.

The 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.