You wouldn't believe ... except that it really is happening
YourEyes said:
How exactly did his personal info with his mistress leak out? Was it her who decided to get famous?
Well, okay, there are four main players here:
• David Petraeus, a disgraced former General and CIA Director
• Paula Broadwell, his biographer and mistress
• Jill Kelley, a Tampa socialite with prior association to Petraeus and Allen
• Gen. John Allen, outgoing commander of American forces in Afghanistan
As far as anyone can tell, no, Broadwell did not decide to get famous; she already had her fame.
For reasons not yet clear, Broadwell apparently sent Kelley a series of hostile emails.
Kelley asked a friend with FBI connections about the emails; that is how the affair entered the system. The FBI picked up the case as a cybercrime investigation.
When the trail led back to Broadwell, the FBI reviewed her emails, and discovered evidence of the affair between her and Petraeus. But the investigation also revealed a large number of emails between Kelley and General Allen.
Perhaps the most chilling suggestion is that there is no crime to investigate.
Glenn Greenwald explains the situation from a perspective critical of the “surveillance state”:
As is now widely reported, the FBI investigation began when Jill Kelley - a Tampa socialite friendly with Petraeus (and apparently very friendly with Gen. John Allen, the four-star U.S. commander of the war in Afghanistan) - received a half-dozen or so anonymous emails that she found vaguely threatening. She then informed a friend of hers who was an FBI agent, and a major FBI investigation was then launched that set out to determine the identity of the anonymous emailer.
That is the first disturbing fact: it appears that the FBI not only devoted substantial resources, but also engaged in highly invasive surveillance, for no reason other than to do a personal favor for a friend of one of its agents, to find out who was very mildly harassing her by email. The emails Kelley received were, as the Daily Beast reports, quite banal and clearly not an event that warranted an FBI investigation ....
.... That this deeply personal motive was what spawned the FBI investigation is bolstered by the fact that the initial investigating agent "was barred from taking part in the case over the summer due to superiors' concerns that he was personally involved in the case" - indeed, "supervisors soon became concerned that the initial agent might have grown obsessed with the matter" - and was found to have "allegedly sent shirtless photos" to Kelley, and "is now under investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility, the internal-affairs arm of the FBI" ....
.... So all based on a handful of rather unremarkable emails sent to a woman fortunate enough to have a friend at the FBI, the FBI traced all of Broadwell's physical locations, learned of all the accounts she uses, ended up reading all of her emails, investigated the identity of her anonymous lover (who turned out to be Petraeus), and then possibly read his emails as well. They dug around in all of this without any evidence of any real crime - at most, they had a case of "cyber-harassment" more benign than what regularly appears in my email inbox and that of countless of other people - and, in large part, without the need for any warrant from a court.
But that isn't all the FBI learned. It was revealed this morning that they also discovered "alleged inappropriate communication" to Kelley from Gen. Allen, who is not only the top commander in Afghanistan but was also just nominated by President Obama to be the Commander of US European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe (a nomination now "on hold") ....
.... So not only did the FBI - again, all without any real evidence of a crime - trace the locations and identity of Broadwell and Petreaus, and read through Broadwell's emails (and possibly Petraeus'), but they also got their hands on and read through 20,000-30,000 pages of emails between Gen. Allen and Kelley.
While some might remind that Greenwald is a flaming left-wing libertarian, that would largely pertain to his whining about the surveillance state. For instance, would a scandal like this usher in the surveillance state by having people focus on a non-event, or is it a blow to the surveillance state because it is, in the end, so paltry? We can leave that question to the tinfoils, of course, but there is an underlying point worth considering. When the toll is paid, and the damage added up, what will the final tab be? Congress has suffered seizures over the episode, one career is ruined, another is slipping down the drain, and a third is under question until people can figure out how Gen. Allen managed to exchange as much as thirty-thousand pages of email with someone. The only price Jill Kelley is paying is that some people of no real consequence are looking anew at a shady charity she was involved in. Petraeus is out at CIA; Broadwell is out at Harvard; Allen is under the gun with his future hanging in the balance. And nobody, it seems, did anything illegal.
Though FBI Agent Frederick Humphries might eventually have to answer for a few things, including running to Rep. Dave Reichert (R-WA), who handed the issue off to Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), who called in to FBI Director Mueller, who in turn had a chat with DNI James Clapper, who then had a sit-down with David Petraeus, who resigned his position because the FBI was investigating an extramarital affair. Agent Humphries' operational status within the Bureau is currently under review.
This whole thing is hilarious in the sense that it wouldn't sell in Hollywood for being unbelievable for gross stupidity. Then again, truth is necessarily stranger than fiction.
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Notes:
Greenwald, Glenn. “FBI's abuse of the surveillance state is the real scandal needing investigation”. The Guardian. November 13, 2012. Guardian.co.uk. November 18, 2012. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/13/petraeus-surveillance-state-fbi