JERUSALEM – After a Manhattan jury on Thursday convicted former President Trump of falsifying business records, legal experts have commented on the similarities between his case and the ongoing prosecution of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel’s then-attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, charged Netanyahu with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in a legal saga that started four years ago and is still unfolding. Netanyahu has flatly denied all the accusations against him.

Fox News Digital reached out to leading legal experts who are well versed in the hard-charging and no-holds-barred electoral and judicial systems in both democracies.

Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at George Mason University Scalia Law School and a scholar at the Kohelet Policy Forum, a Jerusalem think tank, told Fox News Digital, ‘Israel has always been the canary in the coalmine for threats to freedom and Western democracy. The politicized prosecutions on obscure and incomprehensible charges and victimless crimes that has been used on President Trump greatly resemble the prosecutions of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Israel’s situation is worse – Netanyahu was indicted four years ago after years-long investigations, making the prosecution a never-ending shadow on his political career.’

He added ‘Moreover, in Israel, prosecutors are not elected or even politically appointed, so there is not even the bitter consolation that both sides can play the same game.’

He continued, ‘But in what could be a good omen for Trump, Netanyahu’s political opponents thought the multiple criminal proceedings would end his political career, but instead he has gone on to win multiple elections because voters stopped taking the prosecutions seriously.’

Modern politics is filled with examples of court systems turned into blunt instruments to railroad politicians and dissidents who upset political parties and opponents.

Perhaps the most famous recent case is authoritarian Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imprisonment of his most potent political rival, Alexei Navalny, who was found dead in an Arctic penal colony in February. Putin’s critics claimed he was behind the killing. Russia’s opaque judiciary sentenced Navalny to a 19-year term for extremism. His defenders say he was persecuted by Putin because he was the first politician to build a national Russian opposition movement that seeks to end Putin’s more than two decades of control over Russia.

In 2023, the late-Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was found not guilty of witness tampering in connection with alleged sex parties, called ‘bunga bunga,,’ at his villa in Milan. He claimed that his political enemies manufactured the sex scandal allegations.

The controversial Italian politician died last year. He referred to himself as the ‘Jesus Christ of politics.’ In 2013, however, Italy’s high court affirmed a conviction for tax fraud against Berlusconi.

The former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted as the country’s leader in 2022 and sentenced to multiple prison terms for corruption, including leaking state secrets. Khan argues that the cases against him are politically motivated and his supporters have filled the streets of the Southeast Asian country to protest his incarceration.

Khan, a former cricket star who became an Islamist politician, is now facing 170 pending legal cases against him. The charges include terrorism, incitement to violence and graft. In March 2022, Khan claimed at a rally that a foreign conspiracy was working against him. He said a document showed that ‘all will be forgiven if Imran Khan is removed from power.’ A month later, Khan was dislodged as prime minister by a no-confidence vote in the parliament.

America’s former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who is a lawyer, told Fox News Digital, ‘The most important feature of a functioning democracy is its ability to instill confidence in the fairness of its judiciary. In the Trump case, the prosecution and the court have pursued a frivolous case and done enormous damage to our democracy. I am less familiar with the prime minister’s issues, but it is clear that in Israel there also exists a significant part of the population that is losing confidence in the judiciary.’

Friedman, who served during the Trump administration and played a key role in relocating the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital, Jerusalem, added, ‘This is always a byproduct of prosecuting political opponents. When done, the facts and the law must be compelling and even overwhelming. That’s clearly not present in either case.’

Dr. Anthony Fauci, former Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, on Monday denied attempting to suppress the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic began as a result of a lab leak in Wuhan, China, during his opening statement before the House Oversight Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Lawmakers proceeded to grill Fauci throughout the hearing on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s six-feet distancing rule, the masking of schoolchildren and other pandemic-era restrictions. 

Fauci testified affirmatively each time when asked by Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, if business closures, church closures, school closures and stay at home order were justified, adding that ‘again, this was when we were trying to stop the tsunami of deaths that were occurring early on – how long you kept them going is debatable.’ 

Asked again about mask mandates, including those for children under the age of 5, Fauci said those were in the context of the time ‘when 5,000 people a day were dying.’ 

‘Mask mandates for children under the age of five? There’s scientific evidence supporting that?’ the congressman asked. 

‘There was no study that did masks on kids before,’ Fauci admitted. ‘You couldn’t do the study. You had to respond to an epidemic that was killing 4-5,000 Americans a day.’ 

Fauci also attempted to clarify an earlier statement that the six-foot social distancing rule ‘just appeared,’ telling committee members that ‘it actually came from the CDC.’ 

‘The CDC was responsible for those kinds of guidelines for schools, not me. So when I said that, it just appeared. It appeared. Was there any science behind it? What I meant by no science behind it is that there wasn’t a controlled trial. That said, compare six foot with three feet with ten feet. So there wasn’t that scientific evaluation of it. What I believe the CDC used for their reason to say six feet is that studies years ago showed that when you’re dealing with droplets, which at the time that the CDC made that recommendation, it was felt that the transmission was primarily through droplet, not aerosol, which is incorrect because we know now aerosol does play a role. That’s the reason why they did it. It had little to do with me since I didn’t make the recommendation.’ 

Fauci also defended vaccine mandates for students, employees and the military by stating, ‘Vaccines save lives. It is very, very clear that vaccines have saved hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions worldwide.’ 

‘In the beginning, it clearly prevented infection in a certain percentage of people but the durability of its ability to prevent infection was not long. It was measured in months,’ he added. 

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., pressed Fauci on past comments he made during an appearance on CBS’s ‘Face the Nation,’ when he claimed that those who criticize him are ‘really criticizing science because I represent science.’ At the time, the remark drew ire, getting slammed by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who accused him of having a ‘delusion of grandeur that you cannot criticize him.’

Elon Musk also criticized Fauci, posting on social media, ‘Anyone who says that questioning them is questioning science itself cannot be regarded as a scientist.’ 

Asked Monday if he represents science, Fauci testified, ‘I am a scientist who uses the scientific method to gain information.’ 

In his opening statement, Fauci addressed the COVID-19 lab leak theory. stressing to the committee that he never sought to suppress that idea.

He testified that on Jan. 31, 2020, he ‘was informed through phone calls with Jeremy Farrar, then director of the Wellcome Trust in the UK, and then with Kristian Anderson, a highly regarded scientist at Scripps Research Institute, that they and Eddie Holmes, a world-class evolutionary biologist from Australia, were concerned that the genomic sequence of SARS-CoV-2 suggested that the virus could have been manipulated in a lab.’ 

The next day, Fauci said, he participated in a conference call ‘with about a dozen international virologists to discuss this possibility versus a spillover from an animal reservoir.’ Fauci described the conference call discussion as ‘lively with arguments for both possibilities,’ and said two participants have testified before the House subcommittee that he ‘did not try to steer the discussion in any direction.’ 

‘It was decided that several participants would more carefully examine the genomic sequence after this further examination. Several who at first were concerned about lab manipulation became convinced that the virus was not deliberately manipulated. They concluded that the most likely scenario was the spillover from an animal reservoir, although they still kept an open mind,’ Fauci said. ‘They appropriately published their opinion in the peer-reviewed literature.’

‘The accusation being circulated that I influenced these scientists to change their minds by bribing them with millions of dollars in grant money is absolutely false and simply preposterous. I had no input into the content of the published paper,’ Fauci said in his opening statement. ‘The second issue is a false accusation that I tried to cover up the possibility that the virus originated from a lab. In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite.’ 

The Republican-led subcommittee has spent over a year probing the nation’s response to the pandemic and whether U.S.-funded research in China may have played any role in how it started. Democrats opened the hearing saying the investigation so far has found no evidence that Fauci did anything wrong, while missing an important opportunity to prepare for the next scary outbreak.

Fauci spent 14 hours over two days in January being grilled by the House panel behind closed doors. Monday’s hearing was the first time Fauci was questioned in public and on camera since he ended more than five decades of government service.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. 

Former President Trump has joined TikTok, the embattled Chinese-owned social media platform that he once tried to ban during his years in the White House.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s first post on TikTok was a launch video on Saturday night on a verified account – @realDonaldTrump – showing him waving to fans at an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fight in Newark, New Jersey, that he attended a couple of hours earlier. 

‘The president is now on TikTok,’ UFC CEO and Trump friend Dana White said as he introduced the former president in the video.

‘It’s my honor,’ Trump responded in the video. The song ‘American Bad A–‘ by Kid Rock can be heard in the background.

The move appears to be an effort to connect with younger voters who frequent the app, as Trump faces off with President Biden in the 2024 election rematch. The main super PAC supporting Trump, MAGA Inc., joined TikTok a couple of weeks ago. The site has roughly 170 million users in the U.S.

The app appears to be friendly ground for the former president, with roughly twice as many pro-Trump posts compared to pro-Biden posts on the site, according to recent reports from the New York Times and Puck, which cited internal analysis from TikTok.

Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign joined TikTok in February, but the president signed a law in April forcing TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the app within a year or face a ban in the U.S.

Trump, in 2020 during his last year as president, tried to ban the app in the U.S. market over national security concerns. His executive order was eventually blocked in federal court.

Trump changed his mind this year, and came out in opposition to Biden’s potential ban on TikTok.

Some former top Trump advisers – including former senior adviser Kellyanne Conway and David Urban – have been speaking out in favor of TikTok on Capitol Hill.

Regardless, many Republicans continue to criticize the popular app and urge its Chinese-based parent company to divest.

– As Mexicans prepare to vote in the country’s presidential election on Sunday, 2024 has proven to be one of the most violent years for candidates and election officials in the country, with more than 225 killed, according to reports. 

On Wednesday, José Alfredo Cabrera Barrientos was murdered in front of supporters while campaigning for mayor of Coyuca de Benitez, in Guerrero state. He was ahead in the polls, in a region where the cartels are particularly strong.

According to Data Cívica, the victims of electoral political violence increased 235.7% from 2018 to 2023, during the term of the Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) administration, with 2024 being the most violent year so far.

‘I was leaving a neighborhood assembly late at night in the Peralvillo neighborhood when I suffered a cowardly attack. They shot me 6 times while I was inside my vehicle,’ said Alessandra Rojo de la Vega, candidate for mayor of Alcaldía Cuauhtémoc in Mexico City, who survived an assassination attempt a few days ago, in comments to Fox News Digital.

She blamed the lack of security being provided by officials. ‘This has not been the worst thing I have had to go through, but rather facing a prosecutor’s office that responds to government orders. I have been fighting for women victims of violence for 6 years so that they have access to justice. We help 30 women a day here in Mexico City and I know what the prosecutor’s office does, the criminal negligence with which they act. And when it happens to you, it feels so much deeper.’

While the Mexican president’s spokesperson did not respond to Fox News Digital, Reuters recently reported that AMLO deemed the new data ‘sensationalism.’ The Reuters report noted that AMLO defended his record, pointing to a drop of 5% in homicides in 2023 compared to 2022.  

According to a report from the Mexican consulting firm Integralia, political violence has left 701 victims from September 2023 to May 19, 2024, including 225 murders of candidates, politicians or former officials seeking office on June 2.

Candidate Rojo de la Vega complained that, ‘No authority has called me to inform me about how the investigation is going. I have 60 complaints to different authorities for the violence that I have experienced throughout my campaign in Cuauhtémoc and all the demands have been ignored, with the impunity that characterizes this government.’ 

‘The government blames and despises the victims. It is happening to me, and it has happened to thousands of women and Mexicans throughout the country. I am grateful to have the opportunity to make my case visible …the lack of justice and impunity that exists in Mexico which, far from protecting victims, favors criminals.’

According to a special report on political violence, ‘Map of risks of criminal interference in local elections 2024,’ produced by Integralia, ‘Organized crime interferes in elections through: murders, attacks and threats against public officials and candidates, campaign financing, imposition of candidates, mobilization or inhibition of the vote, and alteration of the voting process during the election day.’

The states with the ‘highest risk’ of interference by organized crime in local elections include Guerrero, Michoacán, Colima, Jalisco, Chiapas and Morelos, while nine states have a ‘high risk,’ including Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Zacatecas, Guanajuato, State of Mexico, Tabasco and Veracruz.

The Intergralia report claims that ‘criminal groups mainly subjugate municipal governments to build their authority, so they can have access to valuable resources (such as collaboration with police) in order to operate with full impunity, to diversify their activities, and neutralize their rivals. Electoral processes offer the opportunity to establish and strengthen criminal authority since the beginning of the new administration.’

President López Obrador recently noted that 500 candidates have received federal protection against violence.

‘This time it was my turn. However, this is what all the citizens of Matamoros experience, where confrontations, shootings, and risky situations are experienced every day,’ Leticia Salazar told Fox News Digital. Salazar is a candidate for the municipal presidency of Matamoros. Matamoros is located in Tamaulipas, a border state with the United States.

‘While we toured the Brisas neighborhood, visiting house by house, we encountered a confrontation between criminals and state police. The bullets were very close, but I survived. A family allowed us to take shelter in their home so that the entire team would be safe. Unfortunately, this is what most families in Matamoros suffer. My story is known because I am a candidate seeking the municipal presidency, but it is what the citizens of Matamoros experience every day.’ 

‘We need order in the city of Matamoros. Criminals have advanced so much because no one stopped them. One of the most common crimes here is extortion. It happens to many families, merchants, and businessmen. I am determined to put order in the city. Nobody is going to stop us. Nobody is going to intimidate us nor are we going to be afraid, even having suffered this event,’ she said.

While Claudia Sheinbaum is ahead in official polling, some analysts are pointing to other polls predicting the election is much closer, even positing that the main opposition candidate Xóchitl Gálvez’s showing could surprise many.

Reuters contributed to this report.