Israeli President Isaac Herzog is forcefully denying a bombshell Channel 12 report that he once explored a pre-arranged political deal to grant Benjamin Netanyahu a pardon — years before becoming president — in exchange for Netanyahu’s support for his eventual rise to the office.

The report, aired Tuesday night, centers on a confidential 17-page legal opinion drafted in 2019 for a former Herzog associate. The memo — written while Herzog was helming the Jewish Agency and widely seen as the frontrunner for the next presidency — examined whether an Israeli president could issue a pardon to a sitting prime minister before indictment or conviction. Its release comes just days after Netanyahu formally asked Herzog for a pardon in his corruption case without admitting guilt.

Channel 12 suggested the document may have been produced as part of early groundwork for a political bargain between the two men. Herzog’s office blasted that insinuation as “unfounded and outrageous,” dismissing the report as well outside what it called legitimate journalistic boundaries. The president has instructed his attorney to take “appropriate legal action.”

“There was never any agreement, understanding or acknowledgment between President Isaac Herzog and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu linking Herzog’s tenure to Netanyahu’s legal proceedings, neither explicitly nor implicitly,” the president’s office said. “Anyone who claims otherwise is lying and risks legal consequences.”

According to Channel 12, the opinion — authored by prominent attorney Eyal Rozovsky — explores a series of sensitive questions: whether a pre-conviction pardon falls within the Israeli president’s sweeping clemency powers; whether a pardon issued before trial would implicitly admit guilt; and whether such a move could be packaged as part of an agreed political exit for Netanyahu.

The memo allegedly leans heavily on precedent from the Bus 300 affair, in which then-president Chaim Herzog, the current president’s father, pardoned Shin Bet officials before they were convicted. Channel 12 described the legal opinion as using that case as a template for the legality of early pardons.

The network quoted an unnamed source “close to Herzog” at the time suggesting the document was solicited for political rather than legal reasons — a claim Herzog’s office flatly rejects.

Herzog’s office insists that the memo was not commissioned by Herzog but by his former adviser Motti Sander, acting personally in 2019. Sander, they note, was no longer part of Herzog’s circle by the time he launched his presidential campaign. The office added that Herzog only learned of the memo’s existence when it surfaced in the press years later.

“Mr. Sander apparently asked for the legal opinion, having for years tried to push a plea bargain and pardon for Prime Minister Netanyahu,” the president’s office said.

Officials further stressed that Herzog won the presidency in 2021 with a sweeping 87-vote Knesset majority, underscoring that he “did not need the support of Netanyahu or others on his behalf.”

The timing of the Channel 12 report is politically explosive. Netanyahu’s unprecedented request for a presidential pardon — filed last week — is already testing Israel’s institutional boundaries as the prime minister remains on trial.

Herzog’s office reiterated that the pardon request is currently undergoing a multi-week review process within the Justice Ministry and that no decision is imminent.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)