As if he weren’t in enough trouble, a new scandal has emerged for Ehud Olmert. According to a report released today by the Israeli State Comptroller, Olmert, while serving as Minister of Industry, Trade, and Labor, improperly pushed for the creation of an economically disastrous tourism project called Aquaria, near the southern port city of Eilat. “Olmert intervened both directly and via his assistants in the . . . ‘Aquaria’ issue in a manner that can be construed as . . . an application of pressure by the minister,” writes the Comptroller, former Supreme Court Justice Michael Lindenstrauss, in his report.

Olmert, for his part, has referred to the state comptroller’s different investigations as nothing less than the “creations of a very tortured imagination of a person who set out for himself the target to remove the prime minister, on a personal basis. This is what we are talking about. He said this is his mission: To hit me. Like an asteroid.”

Up till now, Lindenstrauss has managed to avoid creating the impression of being an asteroid, and it is unlikely that this report will go uninvestigated. Looking back, however, I think a better astronomical metaphor would be a meteor–referring to Olmert’s catastrophic political freefall in the last year.