Jealousy and the general

A Petraeus Puzzle: Were Politics Involved?

Posted by Jane Mayer, The New Yorker

The director of the C.I.A. has resigned over an extra-marital affair two days after a Presidential election in which the Agency’s role in Libya was of burning concern—what is really going on here?

There seem to be some potentially fascinating political aspects of this story that have yet to be explored. Why, for instance, did this news explode publicly when it did? Both the New York Times and the Washington Post report that the F.B.I. had found, after months of investigation, that neither retired General David Petraeus, now the former director of the C.I.A., nor the woman with whom he was evidently involved, his biographer Paula Broadwell, had broken any laws. Congressional intelligence officials reportedly want to know why they were not informed earlier that the F.B.I. was investigating Petraeus. But what I am wondering is why, if the F.B.I. had indeed concluded that they had no criminal case, this matter was brought to anyone’s attention at all.

The investigation apparently began when another woman Petraeus knew—the A.P. identified her as Jill Kelley, a Florida woman with connections to the military—complained about harassing e-mails, which turned out to have been from Broadwell. It’s not yet clear how directly the e-mails involved Petraeus. As an official told the Wall Street Journal, “This investigation wasn’t about the C.I.A. director, it was about what looked like a cyber crime.” In this case, like any other, the official went on, “There are strict rules, there is a wall, about sharing information on ongoing criminal investigations.”

(More here.)