As recently as the run-up to last year’s elections, Ehud Olmert was looking forward to a prime ministerial comeback.

Several opinion polls suggested that he might have a realistic opportunity to oust his former Likud colleague Benjamin Netanyahu from power.

In the end, Olmert chose to sit out last year’s elections — sparing, one suspects, many Israelis the dilemma of whether to vote for someone whose national policies they liked but whose conduct was under such relentless legal scrutiny. But until Monday, he still cherished the notion that his political career would yet be resurrected.

In the wake of Monday’s shattering verdict, in which he was convicted of taking bribes in the Holyland case, Olmert’s lawyers and advisers insisted, properly, that they would carefully examine the judge’s findings before deciding their next steps forward.

Some of them also asserted that the last word had yet to be said on the Olmert corruption affair — a sordid, shameful, unprecedented case of an Israeli prime minister convicted of bribe-taking, and facing the very real possibility of a prison term.

Read the article in full at Times of Israel.