Petraeus Plot Twists: Shirtless FBI Agent and Another Flirting General
Jill Kelley/ ABC
The media coverage of David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell is finally taking a detour from its heavy focus on sex.
Now journalists are asking the overdue question: What the hell were FBI agents doing snooping around the CIA director’s e-mail over an affair that broke no laws and is not exactly unusual behavior in Washington?
Not only that, there’s another general whose emails to a woman not his wife have come under investigation–and promptly leaked to the press.
Turns out the FBI agent who launched the probe is himself under investigation, says the Wall Street Journal. The paper says the agent sent a shirtless photo of himself to Jill Kelley, the Tampa activist who received what she considered harassing e-mails from Broadwell.
This is turning into a really bad Hollywood potboiler.
The unnamed agent was a friend of Kelley. His bosses grew so concerned that he had become obsessed with the matter that he was taken off the case.
Naturally, there has been plenty of media speculation about exactly what Broadwell told Kelley that prompted her to call the cops. The emails were sent anonymously. According to the Journal:
One asked if Ms. Kelley’s husband was aware of her actions, according to officials. In another, the anonymous writer claimed to have watched Ms. Kelley touching “him” provocatively underneath a table, the officials said.
Not pleasant, but not exactly threatening.
So for all the coming melodrama about who knew what when and when the ill-fated affair started, journalists should not lose sight of the FBI may have committed a gross breach of privacy–and because one guy may have been hot for Jill Kelley.
But wait! The Washington Post reports this morning that the FBI probe has expanded to include Gen. John Allen, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, over 20,000 to 30,000 “potentially inappropriate” e-mails between Allen and Jill Kelley. How did he have time to run the war?
And “potentially inappropriate”? Don’t they know it when they see it?
This story, for the media, is clearly the gift that keeps on giving.
Footnote: Broadwell’s ghostwriter, the Washington Post’s Vernon Loeb, says he never suspected the affair, declaring: “My wife says I’m the most clueless person in America.”
Share this article
You might also like:
Comments
Latest Posts
Social Media Powers Road Trip
May 25th, 2013So what’s a tweet, a Facebook like or
a picture on Instagram really worth?
For the 30 students from Kansas City
who participate in the program
Minddrive, social media will literally
fuel their road trip to Washington
later this month.
“Minddrive is an after-school program
for at-risk kids and we teach them
about math and science, technology
and the environment through hands-on
projects,” CEO Steve Rees explains in
the company’s promotional video
shared on YouTube.
DIY Hacking Ikea Style
May 24th, 2013You don’t get to be the world’s largest furniture store without delivering popular, accessible design at a reasonable price. When you throw in eco-sensitive and durable construction and a tiny Allen key, you’ve got a world-beater, and that’s Ikea.
When you add in a do-it-yourself attitude, an informed design aesthetic and crowd-sourced problem-solving, you’ve got something very different: IkeaHackers.
NASA Making Printable Pizza Good Enough to Eat
May 24th, 2013Everyone loves pizza, and everyone loves astronauts, so when you put pizza, a Star Trek food replicator, and NASA together, how could you miss?
3D printing is currently considered The Coolness in nerdland, and we have to admit it’d be a pretty jaded futurist who wouldn’t consider it pretty amazing technology. It’s the promise with which science fiction has long tantalized us: Whatever you can design or imagine can be yours, with the click of a mouse.
New Twitter App ‘Retwacts’ Your Tweets
May 23rd, 2013On a really bad day, a quick, inaccurate tweet can spiral a news story out of control, as seen prominently during the coverage of the recent bombings in Boston. As of now, Twitter doesn’t have its own fix.
As the Atlantic’s Brian Fung reported earlier this month, software developer Stonly Baptiste – whose daytime job is with the Pennsylvania-based company independenceIT – has developed a plug-in app that could solve the problem. He named it Retweet Retwact or Retwact (see what he did there?).
Soldier ‘Before and After’ Portraits Go Viral
May 23rd, 2013We Are Not the Dead documents the effects of war in a virtual photo gallery. The images portray 15 British soldiers before, during and after serving in Afghanistan and are captioned with their thoughts from each time period. Between yearnings for the feel of carpet underfoot and expressions of repatriated culture shock (pink hair!) it chronicles the limitless human capacity to normalize anything, even IEDs. It is just how we cope.
“It was a nightmare trying to extract [a wounded soldier] and get the chopper in while we were in water up to your chin, it was horrible,” says Private Ben Frater, 21. “And now we are home? It’s strange. Quiet. I find that I’m getting bored easily after 10 minutes. I feel anxious all the time that I should be doing something.”
