If you have been watching the news recently you have
probably heard of a scandal in the US involving a man named David Petraeus, the
CIA and an extra-marital affair. The short (short) story is that General David
Petraeus resigned as head of the CIA after his affair with his biographer,
Paula Broadwell, was made public. The reality is, the episode is much more
complex/
We do not yet know what date the affair began between
Petraeus and Broadwell, although this might seem like an uninteresting detail,
it could be very important. The reason: it’s illegal for a member of the US
military to be involved in an extra-marital affair! So if the affair began
before 31st of August 2011, when Petraeus retired from the military,
he could face trial in a military court! This is pretty straight forward, the
rest is like a spiders web of connexions and people extending across various
arms of government. Let’s start with Paula Broadwell; she sent threatening
emails to a friend of Petraeus, Jill Kelley, telling her to back off from
Petraeus feeling they were getting too close. She sent the emails anonymously
under the pseudonym, ‘KelleyPatrol’. Kelley was worried about the threatening
letters in these emails and asked a friend at the FBI, Frederick Humphries II,
to investigate. Humphries got an investigation going, but did not get assigned to
it. Growing increasingly impatient as nothing was moving, he phoned two House
Republicans, Eric Cantor and Dave Reichart, in the (false) belief that the
Obama administration was trying to cover something up due to political
intentions. As the FBI began to probe into the emails, they found another
individual was in this complex web, General John Allen, Petraeus’ successor as
commander of the US forces in Afghanistan. It was discovered that he had sent
20,000-30,000 emails to Jill Kelley; these emails were supposedly flirtatious
and inappropriate in nature. Despite these emails, both parties deny any affair
taking place! Allen wasn’t the only person Kelley was getting attention from;
the FBI agent had sent her topless pictures of himself to her!
That is a summary of what happened before the information went
public, what came next was a storm.
As soon as the election finished and Obama was declared the
winner, the scandal fell out of control and turned into a full-blown crisis. The
White House received word of the looming crisis on the 7th of
November, the day after the election. Obama’s National Security Advisor, Tom
Donilon, decided to wait to inform Obama until the next day. Once Obama heard
of the situation he said that he was not ready to allow Petraeus to resign and
that “he wanted to sleep on it”. It wouldn’t be long before he was forced to
accept the resignation, on the 9th of November CIA director, General
David Petraeus resigned. It was also immediately clear that the career of
General John Allen was also in jeopardy when he was implicated in the scandal.
To make matters worse, Allen was scheduled to appear before the Senate as he
was going to become the top US military official in Europe. The discovery of
the excessive volume of emails between Kelley and Allen caused the hearings to
be suspended.
Naturally the politicians were furious; Obama had no chance
to formulate a response before the public knew, nobody had even told him about
the investigation being conducted or anything related to it. Many Republicans
found it suspicious that the revelations occurred immediately after the
election, was the Obama administration hiding something? The relevant
Committees in Congress were also angry about being kept in the dart for so long
about the FBI investigation. The whole mess is far from sorted, Obama has to
draw up a new cabinet, sort out this mess in the military/CIA/FBI and he’s
going to try and broker a deal with Republicans regarding the fiscal cliff; all
in the ‘lame duck’ session of Congress. There doesn’t seem to be anything ‘lame’
about this current session.
If you still are struggling to understand this situation, I hope this spider's web of information will be of help.
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