Tampa’s Bayshore Boulevard is in the news today because it is
the home of Jill Kelley, who played a crucial role in the scandal
that brought down CIA Director David Petraeus.
Mrs. Kelley’s complaint to the FBI about threatening e-mails she
received in May led to an investigation that exposed an affair
between Petraeus, the retired four-star general who had been top
U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, and his biographer, Paula
Broadwell. In recent days, a
Tampa TV station reported, Mrs. Kelley has repeatedly called
police seeking protection, at one point invoking her status as
“honorary consul general.” She has been described as an unofficial
“social liaison” at nearby MacDill Air Force Base, and now the
media are encamped in front of the home that Mrs. Kelley shares
with her surgeon husband, Dr. Scott Kelley, and their three
children.
So far as we know, the Kelleys have done nothing wrong and were
innocently drawn into this scandal because of the mistaken jealousy
of Broadwell, a married mother of two who admittedly carried on an
adulterous affair with Petraeus, who is likewise married. However,
the FBI is now reportedly examining thousands of “potentially
inappropriate” e-mails between Mrs. Kelley and Marine Gen. John
Allen, who currently commands all U.S. and NATO forces in
Afghanistan. Even without any hanky-panky on Allen’s part —
both he and Mrs. Kelley’s family strongly deny any such insinuation
— there are still many intriguing questions swirling around this
story. So the camera crews are likely to remain staked out on
Bayshore Boulevard, while reporters, editors, and producers explore
these questions, including the big one: How does this relate to the
apparent failures in Libya that led to the death of U.S. Ambassador
Chris Stevens two months ago?
It is possible that, amid the tawdry details of the affair
between Petraeus and Broadwell, there may lie at least serious
clues to the debacle in Benghazi. To extend the possibilities even
further, the sex-scandal aspects of this story may bring fresh
political hope to Republicans who have been downcast and despondent
since last week’s catastrophic election. The GOP’s finger-pointing
and navel-gazing could all be moot, if it should turn out that
President Obama squeezed to a narrow victory while his
administration was (with the help of its media allies) covering up
a genuinely serious scandal.
Consider the
suggestion made yesterday by Katie Pavlich: In a speech late
last month that had previously gotten little notice, Broadwell said
that the CIA was holding prisoners at an annex to the consulate in
Benghazi. “This explains two things,” wrote Pavlich, author of a
bestselling book about the Justice Department’s gun-running
scandal. “The U.S. consulate in Benghazi was being repeatedly
attacked because prisoners were being held and because President
Obama signed an executive order in 2009 banning secret CIA prisons,
they had to find an alternative story to cover-up what really
happened, hence the YouTube video.”
Is this indeed the explanation for the Obama administration’s
dishonest attempt to blame the death of Ambassador Stevens and
three other Americans on an obscure anti-Islam video? Certainly, as
the CIA chief’s biographer and mistress, Broadwell was
well-positioned to know the truth of the agency’s operations. And
if the CIA was indeed running a secret prison in Libya contrary to
the president’s executive order, well, what did the president know
and when did he know it? (As the
Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto notes, the CIA has
adamantly denied holding prisoners in Libya.)
Far beyond Benghazi, however, there was a lot the president
probably should have known about Petraeus’s activities that —
at least if you believe the White House — he wasn’t told
until after the election. And a lot of that has to do with Jill
Kelley, her husband and her twin sister, Natalie Khawam, whose
friendship with both Petraeus and Allen would seem cause for
security concerns, even apart from the Broadwell affair.
Mrs. Kelley has been described as a Tampa “socialite,” a term
that might imply great wealth, but it appears that the expense of
her posh lifestyle exceeded her family’s income. She and her
husband have
reportedly been sued by banks for $4 million, including a
delinquent mortgage on their $1.2 million home on fashionable
Bayshore Drive. The couple’s troubling debts, however, did not
prevent them from hosting parties at which their guests enjoyed
lavish buffets, premium cigars, and music provided by string
quartets. Meanwhile, Mrs. Kelley’s sister was going through an
acrimonious divorce and in April filed for bankruptcy, listing more
than $3 million in debts.
The Kelleys apparently began their friendship with Petraeus in
2008, when the four-star general took over U.S. Central Command
based at MacDill. The general and his wife, Holly, were frequent
guests at the Kelley family’s six-bedroom home, while Jill Kelley
and her sister reportedly took Mrs. Petraeus out for lunches and
shopping trips after the general was deployed to Afghanistan in
2010. The Kelleys similarly befriended Allen, who succeeded
Petraeus as the general in charge of CentCom. This is the innocent
explanation for how, among other things, both Petraeus and Allen
wrote letters on behalf of Mrs. Kelley’s sister to a judge in
Washington, D.C., who was supervising the custody dispute between
her and her ex-husband. (The judge reportedly described the sister
as dishonest and “psychologically unstable.”) However innocent the
explanation, eyebrows were raised after it was reported that the
FBI was poring over as many as 30,000 pages of e-mails between
Allen and Mrs. Kelley.
The general’s office described these messages as “innocuous,”
many of them CC’d to the general and his wife, but the sheer volume
of the correspondence was troubling to many. And then there was the
report in the Washington Post that Mrs. Kelley, who as
a child immigrated to the United States from Lebanon with her
family, “was a ‘self-appointed’ go-between for Central Command
officers with Lebanese and other Middle Eastern government
officials.” A heavily indebted socialite close to top U.S. military
and intelligence officials who is also simultaneously in
communication with foreign governments? If anyone at FBI
headquarters hears an unexplained sound, it’s probably J. Edgar
Hoover’s ghost screaming “security risk!”
It wasn’t until Mrs. Kelley began getting mysteriously
threatening e-mails, however, that the FBI took an interest. Some
of the messages suggested a disturbing familiarity with the comings
and goings of top U.S. officials and, by September, the bureau was
ready to confront Broadwell with the evidence that she had sent the
threats. Published accounts, including a
timeline compiled by NBC News, say that the affair between
Broadwell and Petraeus lasted about eight months, from last
November to July of this year. By late summer, Attorney General
Eric Holder was informed of the FBI’s investigation, but (if you
believe what has been reported so far) Holder didn’t bother to tell
the president that the CIA director had been caught in this
compromising situation.
Some conservatives have expressed suspicion that the belated
revelation of the Broadwell-Petraeus affair is, in fact, part of
the Obama administration’s attempt to distract from upcoming
congressional hearings about the Benghazi attack. These suspicious
minds see the sex scandal as the administration’s way of
discrediting Petraeus, whose testimony about the failures in Libya
could implicate other top officials. That theory seems too complex
and conspiratorial to me. More likely, as
Tim Stanley of the London Daily Telegraph says, the
sordid mess surrounding Petraeus “testifies to the extraordinary
incompetence at all levels of the federal security state.”
The simplest and most obvious explanation is that administration
officials, in an effort to keep a lid on everything — from
Benghazi to Bayshore Drive — suppressed the ugly facts until
after the election. Whether this suppression will be construed as a
“cover-up,” involving the kind of wrongful actions that might be
seen as “high crimes and misdemeanors,” could depend in large
measure on two usually antagonistic forces: Republicans in
Congress, dispirited by their election losses, and a media
establishment that has spent the past week transparently
celebrating Obama’s re-election. If the GOP can recover enough
morale to fight for the truth, and if the media can put down their
partisan pompoms long enough to do some serious reporting,
Americans may soon see their president in a much less flattering
light.
