Petraeus Resigns as CIA Director

[General Mung Beans]

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I knew this assclown would get himself fucked eventually. I didn't know he'd do it literally, though.

What the hell is your problem with General Petreaus?

Very saddened to hear this.

[Flagg]

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! I knew this assclown would get himself fucked eventually. I didn't know he'd do it literally, though.

What the hell is your problem with General Petreaus?

Pretty much everything Hastings said in the linked video interview.

[TimothyC]

One idea that I've had is that this came out now because he was off nailing his mistress when the Benghazi attack was happening. It really helps explain the timing.

[Flagg]

One idea that I've had is that this came out now because he was off nailing his mistress when the Benghazi attack was happening. It really helps explain the timing.

Sorry, but the more I think about it the less likely this has anything to do with Benghazi it seems. Especially since Congress can still make him testify. Plus, it seems more likely that his mistress was his biographer and he allowed to her access to his email and possibly even classified information. That's what the FBI is probing, anyway.

[Flagg]

So on MSNBC Richard Engel reported that the FBI is simply making sure that this woman wasn't given or sought access to the Generals emails, and there aren't any charges expected at all.

[Gandalf]

The current right wing paranoia line is that this has something to do with Benghazi. How exactly this is supposed to help a cover up is beyond me.

The alternate reality seen by the right wing is currently all about Benghazi. They will pound on it like obsessives.

They want their own version of "Bush lied, people died."

Also apparently impeaching presidents is OK now that it's a Democrat.

[Chirios]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/magaz ... .html?_r=0

My wife is having an affair with a government executive. His role is to manage a project whose progress is seen worldwide as a demonstration of American leadership. (This might seem hyperbolic, but it is not an exaggeration.) I have met with him on several occasions, and he has been gracious. (I doubt if he is aware of my knowledge.) I have watched the affair intensify over the last year, and I have also benefited from his generosity. He is engaged in work that I am passionate about and is absolutely the right person for the job. I strongly feel that exposing the affair will create a major distraction that would adversely impact the success of an important effort. My issue: Should I acknowledge this affair and finally force closure? Should I suffer in silence for the next year or two for a project I feel must succeed? Should I be “true to my heart” and walk away from the entire miserable situation and put the episode behind me? NAME WITHHELD

Don’t expose the affair in any high-profile way. It would be different if this man’s project was promoting some (contextually hypocritical) family-values platform, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. The only motive for exposing the relationship would be to humiliate him and your wife, and that’s never a good reason for doing anything. This is between you and your spouse. You should tell her you want to separate, just as you would if she were sleeping with the mailman. The idea of “suffering in silence” for the good of the project is illogical. How would the quiet divorce of this man’s mistress hurt an international leadership initiative? He’d probably be relieved.

The fact that you’re willing to accept your wife’s infidelity for some greater political good is beyond honorable. In fact, it’s so over-the-top honorable that I’m not sure I believe your motives are real. Part of me wonders why you’re even posing this question, particularly in a column that is printed in The New York Times.

Your dilemma is intriguing, but I don’t see how it’s ambiguous. Your wife is having an affair with a person you happen to respect. Why would that last detail change the way you respond to her cheating? Do you admire this man so much that you haven’t asked your wife why she keeps having sex with him? I halfway suspect you’re writing this letter because you want specific people to read this column and deduce who is involved and what’s really going on behind closed doors (without actually addressing the conflict in person). That’s not ethical, either.

LOL

[Keevan_Colton]

Remember, there would be a generally very...excitable...voice in his ear telling him to get the guy to stfu in time for the commercial...it's just that usually on camera folk manage to hide reactions to the voices in their heads he might have just been getting an unpleasant earful of turd.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Wait - so did he actually get caught, or did he just flat-out out himself on it because of the guilt (or more likely, due to someone blackmailing him)?

The answer would seem to be that "he got caught."

As has been stated already, his mistress is none other than his biographer (Paula Broadwell.) Who . . . apparently sent threatening e-mails to some other person whom she thought Petraeus was cheating on her with.

So this third person, fearing for her life, went to the FBI. The FBI discovered who the author of the harassing e-mails was. In the course of their investigation, they turned up hundreds, and possibly thousands, of (apparently explicit) e-mails between Broadwell and Petraeus. The local FBI people doing the investigation were in disbelief, thinking Petraeus' e-mail had somehow been hacked. They kicked it up to the national level, where it turned it it was not.

So the FBI went to Petraeus and told him "Hey, we know you've been banging your biographer behind your wife's back. She's hot but ... seriously not cool." End result, Petraeus got to fall on his own sword.

[Guardsman Bass]

So either Petraeus was cheating on her with some other unnamed woman (and Broadwell's a bit jealous and crazy), or he wasn't, and she's even more crazy. Seriously, letters so threatening that the person in question went to the FBI over them? Jesus.

I guess it's not surprising. Fred Kaplan over at Slate said that even considering the facts that Petraeus was real buddy-buddy with the media, Broadwell was unusually close to him:

. . . .

Many of Petraeus’ associates in Kabul, Afghanistan, wondered at the time if something was going on. Petraeus got along famously well with writers and journalists; he cultivated their trust, in part because he liked talking with them, in part because he saw press relations as a key ingredient of “information operations”—a classic military technique to shape the message of a campaign to civilian populations, both in the war zone and on the home front. (I was one of those reporters.) But Broadwell was allowed unusually close access. She was given a room at headquarters. On most early mornings, the two went on 5-mile runs together. Some, including myself, reasoned that this didn’t necessarily imply anything hair-raising: Petraeus went on 5-mile runs with lots of reporters and other visitors. Still, at least one of his assistants warned him to be wary of “appearances.”

Two other things about Broadwell that made her different from his usual crop of acolytes: She was very attractive, and, by all accounts, she went a bit ga-ga for the general. Her biography, All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, is essentially a valentine to the man.

. . . .

In fairness to Petraeus (and Broadwell), they're not the only ones to fuck up like this. Jack Welch was banging his biographer when she turned out the book (she's now his third wife).

[ArmorPierce]

It gets even more crazy when you consider that not only did she send threatening email to the anonymous third woman that she suspected Petraeus to be cheating on her with, she herself was cheating on her husband.

[Guardsman Bass]

Yup.

There are some more details in this New York Times article about it, including some specifics:

. . . .

A close friend of the Petraeus family said Sunday that the intimate relationship between Mr. Petraeus and his biographer, Paula Broadwell, began after he retired from the military last year and about two months after he started as C.I.A. director. It ended about four months ago, said the friend, who did not want to be identified while discussing personal matters. In a letter to the C.I.A. work force on Friday, Mr. Petraeus acknowledged having the affair. Ms. Broadwell has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

. . . .

On Sunday, the same Petraeus family friend confirmed the identity of Ms. Kelley, whose complaint to the F.B.I. about “harassing” e-mails, eventually traced to Ms. Broadwell, set the initial investigation in motion several months ago. Ms. Kelley and her husband became friends with Mr. Petraeus and his wife, Holly, when Mr. Petraeus was head of the military’s Central Command, which has its headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa. Ms. Kelley, who volunteers to help injured service members and military families at MacDill, has been photographed with the Petraeuses at social events in Tampa.

“We and our family have been friends with General Petraeus and his family for over five years,” Ms. Kelley and her husband, Scott Kelley, said in a statement released Sunday. “We respect his and his family’s privacy, and want the same for us and our three children.”

. . . . .

The involvement of the F.B.I., according to government officials, began when Ms. Kelley, alarmed by about half a dozen anonymous e-mails accusing her of inappropriate flirtatious behavior with Mr. Petraeus, complained to an F.B.I. agent who is also a personal friend. That agent, who has not been identified, helped get a preliminary inquiry started. Agents working with federal prosecutors in a local United States attorney’s office began trying to figure out whether the e-mails constituted criminal cyber-stalking.

I'm definitely leaning more towards the "jealous and crazy" theory. Assuming this is true, it sounds like Broadwell broke up with Petraeus, got jealous of Kelley (and/or thought she was his next squeeze), and stupidly fired off a bunch of threatening e-mails. The whole thing sounds like a bloody soap opera.

[Guardsman Bass]

I am a bit curious as to why the FBI put in so much effort on what initially seemed to "just" be a case of cyber-stalking. How threatening were these e-mails?

[General Mung Beans]

I am a bit curious as to why the FBI put in so much effort on what initially seemed to "just" be a case of cyber-stalking. How threatening were these e-mails?

I suspect one of the reasons was that as the article notes one of the agents who was involved in the investigation was a friend of Mrs. Kelley.

[PeZook]

If Broadwell didn't take any precautions, it's not like tracing a bunch of e-mails would be very hard work, anyways. It only blew up because of the connection to Petraeus.

I bet the agents investigating the case were pretty blown away when they learned of that little gem

[Zaune]

If Broadwell didn't take any precautions, it's not like tracing a bunch of e-mails would be very hard work, anyways. It only blew up because of the connection to Petraeus.

I bet the agents investigating the case were pretty blown away when they learned of that little gem

Don't the Bureau also have a bit of a grudge against the CIA, and vice versa, thanks to a turf war over counter-espionage during the Second World War? Someone at headquarters must be having a great laugh over this.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Here's the only coincidence so far which to me seems to offer any evidence of something deeper in this than just the security risk of having a mistress on the side:

You see, Petraeus' mistress claimed last month that the attack on Benghazi was in retaliation for the CIA secretly detaining members of that militant group in a secret facility in the city, i.e., that which had been normal under the Bush administration, but which Obama has officially outlawed by executive order.

The CIA is denying an assertion made by David Petraeus' biographer and girlfriend that the agency held militants in Libya before the Sept. 11 attack.

During a talk last month at the University of Denver, author Paula Broadwell said the CIA had detained people at a secret facility in Benghazi, and the attack on the U.S. Consulate there was an effort to free those prisoners.

President Barack Obama issued an executive order in January 2009 stripping the CIA of its authority to take prisoners.

The move means the CIA can no longer operate secret jails across the globe as it had done under the administration of President George W. Bush.

CIA spokesman Preston Golson said "any suggestion that the agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless."

Now, if we are still detaining people in Libya despite the executive order, and it's supposed to be a state secret, Broadwell saying that in public would be a pretty good reason to investigate if she's hacked Petraeus' e-mails, wouldn't it?

[Guardsman Bass]

It looks like the e-mails didn't contain anything threatening:

The emails that Jill Kelley showed an FBI friend near the start of last summer were not jealous lover warnings like “stay away from my man,” a knowledgeable source tells The Daily Beast.

The messages were instead what the source terms “kind of cat-fight stuff.”

“More like, ‘Who do you think you are? … You parade around the base … You need to take it down a notch,’” according to the source, who was until recently at the highest levels of the intelligence community and prefers not to be identified by name.

The base described is MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, where Kelley serves as an unpaid “social liaison.” The source reports that the emails did make one reference to Gen. David Petraeus, but it was oblique and offered no manifest suggestion of a personal relationship or even that he was central to the sender’s spite.

Kelley herself seemed mystified as to what was behind the emails, much less who sent them.

“I don’t know who this person is and I don’t want to keep getting them,” she told the FBI, as recounted by the source.

When the FBI friend showed the emails to the cyber squad in the Tampa field office, her fellow agents noted that the absence of any overt threats.

“No, ‘I’ll kill you’ or ‘I'll burn your house down,’” the source says. “It doesn’t seem really that bad.”

The squad was not even sure the case was worth pursuing, the source says.

“What does this mean? There’s no threat there. This is against the law?” the agents asked themselves by the source’s account.

At most the messages were harassing. The cyber squad had to consult the statute books in its effort to determine whether there was adequate legal cause to open a case.

“It was a close call,” the source says.

What tipped it may have been Kelley’s friendship with the agent. The squad opened a case, though with no expectation it would turn into anything significant.

. . . .

This just gets weirder and weirder. On top of that, the Wall Street Journal is saying that the ball may have gotten rolling on this because the agent friend that Kelley gave the e-mails to got a little obsessive about the case, and was ultimately taken off of it. He then actually went and tried to contact a member of congress about it, since he was afraid that the case would get dropped.

[Block]

A former deputy director of the FBI said on CNN today that the guy was actually never on the case because it's not in his area of expertise, and that the cyber security group that investigated it cut him off from reports because he was demanding progress reports daily and they got sick of him. Basically it sounds like he was trying to nail Kelley and wanted to bring her proof that he was taking her seriously.

I watched Hannity for 4 minutes tonight and there were literally 12 lies in that span of time on this subject and the attack on the drone in the Gulf.

[Guardsman Bass]

The Washington Post has an article out saying that Kelley may have been screwing around with Petraeus's successor in Afghanistan.

[Block]

The Washington Post has an article out saying that Kelley may have been screwing around with Petraeus's successor in Afghanistan.

So she's married with 3 kids and is sleeping with at least 2 other married men? Classy.

[Dalton]

Gen. John Allen is being probed now in connection with this ...

[Grumman]

When did the US chain of command turn into an episode of Jerry Springer?

[lance]

When did the US chain of command turn into an episode of Jerry Springer?

Jefferson

[Guardsman Bass]

Gen. John Allen is being probed now in connection with this ...

Apparently he and Kelley exchanged thousands of e-mails that indicate a possible liason over a two year period.

The allegations against Allen are said to involve emails between him and Kelley written from 2010 to 2012. Asked if they were of a "sexual nature," a senior defense official would only say the messages were, "potentially inappropriate and they bare looking into. The Department is currently reviewing between 20,000 and 30,000 (pages of) documents connected to this matter."

I wonder how much of this is actually true. It's just so convoluted (and I'll bet that one year down the line, somebody involved will have a book deal on it).