The Supreme Court on Wednesday accepted journalist Omri Assenheim’s appeal against lower court decisions requiring him to hand over all raw materials from his interview with Eli Feldstein, ruling that the police request was too sweeping and that journalistic privilege may extend beyond the identity of a source.
In a precedential decision authored by Supreme Court President Isaac Amit, and joined by Justices Alex Stein and Khaled Kabub, the court held that Israel Police may not demand the entirety of a journalist’s raw materials and only afterward decide what is relevant to an investigation.
Such a request, Amit wrote, was a “fishing expedition - and not with a fishing rod, but with a net.”
The decision does not end the police effort to obtain material from the interview. Rather, the court ordered police to submit a new, narrowed, and concrete request by June 3, explaining, at least “at the level of headings,” which materials they seek and why they are necessary. Assenheim may respond by June 11.
The dispute stems from Assenheim’s three-part KAN 11 interview with Feldstein, aired in December, which touched on the Bild case - the investigation into the alleged leak of a classified IDF document to the German newspaper Bild, allegedly in an effort to influence public opinion on hostage negotiations. Feldstein claimed, in the interview, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chief of staff, Tzachi Braverman, met him late at night in a car in the Kirya parking lot as the affair was unfolding, and allegedly told him he could “shut off” the investigation.
Following the broadcast, police opened a separate investigation into the so-called “midnight meeting.” Braverman has denied wrongdoing.
<strong>Supreme Court limits police access to Assenheim’s interview materials</strong><br>
Police and Netanyahu aide Yonatan Urich had sought the full raw interview materials. Lower courts accepted the police request, finding that the material was relevant to the investigations and that the needs of the criminal probes outweighed Assenheim’s claim to journalistic privilege.
The Supreme Court took a different path.
Amit ruled first that Urich - a suspect in the Bild affair - had no right to initiate such a request, as the legal statute that allows for it in the first place is intended for law enforcement and prosecution authorities, not suspects seeking to shape their own investigations.
He also said that a journalist ordered to hand over material must be allowed to fight the order before complying. The heart of the ruling, however, was the scope of journalistic privilege.
Until now, Israeli case law had largely framed the privilege as protection for confidential sources and information that could expose them. Amit ruled that the privilege may also cover off-the-record material and raw journalistic materials created through trust-based relationships between a journalist and a source, including material left “on the cutting-room floor.”
The privilege remains relative, not absolute. Courts may still order disclosure when the material is relevant, necessary, and essential to justice. But before reaching the privilege question, Amit held that police must first satisfy a stricter preliminary threshold when seeking journalistic material: they must show concrete relevance and necessity and that less intrusive investigative steps were exhausted.
In this case, Amit found, police had not met that burden. Their explanations shifted during the proceedings, and their request for all documents, recordings, objects, and anything directly or indirectly related to the interview was too broad.
Stein added that journalistic privilege applies only within the boundaries of legality and cannot shield a journalist or source who knowingly violates laws concerning state secrets.