Silencing General Petraeus
No keen observer could believe the government's Pollyanna version of these events.
The evidence that Gen. David Petraeus, formerly the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the author of the current Army field manual, Princeton Ph.D. and, until last week, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was forced to resign from the CIA to silence him is far stronger than is the version of events that the Obama administration has given us.
The government would have us believe that because the FBI confronted Petraeus with his emails showing a pattern of inappropriate personal private behavior, he voluntarily departed his job as the country's chief spy to avoid embarrassment. The government would also have us believe that the existence of the general's relationship with Paula Broadwell, an unknown military scholar who wrote a book about him last year, was recently and inadvertently discovered by the FBI while it was conducting an investigation into an alleged threat made by Broadwell to another woman. And the government would as well have us believe that the president learned of all this at 5 p.m. on Election Day.
We now know that the existence of a personal relationship between Broadwell and Petraeus had been suspected and whispered about by his senior-level colleagues and by his personal staff in the military, who worried that it might become publicly known, since before the time that he came to run the CIA.
We also know that when he was nominated to run the CIA, that nomination was preceded by a two-month FBI-conducted background check that likely would have revealed the existence of his relationship with Broadwell. The FBI agents conducting that background check surely would have seen his visitor logs while he commanded our troops and would have interviewed his military colleagues and regular visitors and those colleagues who knew him well and worked with him every day, and thus learned about his personal life. That's their job.
And that information would have been reported immediately to President Obama and to the Senate Intelligence Committee, prior to Petraeus' formal nomination and prior to his Senate confirmation hearing.
In the modern era, office-holders with forgiving spouses simply do not resign from powerful jobs because of a temporary, non-criminal, consensual adult sexual liaison, as the history of the FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, and Clinton presidencies attest. So, why is Petraeus different? Someone wants to silence him.
Petraeus told the Senate and House Intelligence Committees on September 14, 2012, that the mob attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, three days earlier, was a spontaneous reaction of Libyans angered over a YouTube clip some believed insulted the prophet Muhammad. He even referred to that assault—which resulted in the murders of four Americans, now all thought to have been CIA agents—as a "flash mob." His scheduled secret testimony this week before the same congressional committees will produce a chastened, diminished Petraeus who will be confronted with a mountain of evidence contradicting his September testimony, perhaps exposing him to charges of perjury or lying to Congress and causing substantial embarrassment to the president.
It's obvious that someone was out to silence Petraeus. Who could believe the government version of all this? The same government that wants us to believe that FBI agents innocently and accidentally discovered the Petraeus/Broadwell affair a few months ago and confronted Petraeus with his emails a few weeks ago is a cauldron of petty jealousies. From the time of its creation in 1947, the CIA has been a bitter rival of the FBI. The two agencies are both equipped with lethal force, they both often operate outside the law, and they are each seriously potent entities. Their rivalry was tempered by federal laws that until 2001 kept the CIA from operating in the U.S. and the FBI from operating outside the U.S.
In one of his many overreactions to the events of 9/11, however, President George W. Bush changed all that with an ill-conceived executive order that unlawfully unleashed the CIA inside the U.S. and the FBI into foreign countries. Rather than facilitating a cooperative spirit in defense of individual freedom and national security, this reignited their rivalry. FBI agents, for example, publicly exposed CIA agents whom they caught torturing detainees at Gitmo, and Bush was forced to restrain the CIA.
Isn't it odd that FBI agents would be reading the emails of the CIA director to his mistress and that the director of the FBI, who briefs the president weekly, did not make the president aware of this? The FBI could only lawfully spy on Petraeus by the use of a search warrant, and it could only get a search warrant if its agents persuaded a federal judge that Petraeus himself—not his mistress—was involved in criminal behavior under federal law.
The agents also could have bypassed the federal courts and written their own search warrant under the Patriot Act, but only if they could satisfy themselves (a curious and unconstitutional standard) that the general was involved in terror-related activity. Both preconditions for a search warrant are irrelevant and would be absurd in this case.
All this—the FBI spying on the CIA—constitutes the government attacking itself. Anyone who did this when neither federal criminal law nor national security has been implicated and kept the president in the dark has violated about four federal statutes and should be fired and indicted. The general may be a cad and a bad husband, but he has the same constitutional rights as the rest of us.
No keen observer could believe the government's Pollyanna version of these events. When did the CIA become a paragon of honesty? When did the FBI become a paragon of transparency? When did the government become a paragon of telling the truth?
Clinton-Lewinsky "spinners" resurface in generals scandal
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - It's a case of déjà vu in D.C.: some of the same high-profile, high-priced handlers who played supporting roles in the scandal over President Bill Clinton's affair with intern Monica Lewinsky have re-emerged in the sex scandal that has toppled one U.S. national security chief and threatens another.
It is unclear what will be the roles of the expensive legal and crisis-management talent drawn into the uproar over the relationships between former CIA director David Petraeus and Marine General John Allen and two female acquaintances. Neither Republicans nor Democrats in Congress appear to have an appetite for another year-long Monica-style media spectacle.
The latest scandal began with an FBI investigation into cyber-harassment, and indications so far are that ultimately the inquiry will produce no criminal charges.
Nonetheless, both women at the center of attention - Petraeus biographer and former mistress Paula Broadwell and Tampa socialite Jill Kelley, the woman to whom Broadwell is alleged to have sent suspected harassing emails - have turned for advice to veteran Washington lawyers and spin doctors with connections to the Lewinsky brouhaha.
On Monday, a source close to the Kelley family said that two Washington-based players in the Lewinsky scandal, trial lawyer Abbe Lowell and public relations adviser Judy Smith, were working for Kelley.
A day later, a Washington law firm which represented Lewinsky herself confirmed that one of its partners, Robert F. Muse, was representing Broadwell. The three advisors either were unavailable for comment or declined to comment.
It is not known whether Petraeus or Allen, who is the top U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, have retained attorneys.
A complaint by Kelley to the FBI about the harassing emails sparked an investigation that implicated Petraeus in a career-ending affair with Broadwell.
It also embroiled Kelley herself in the uproar over her still-murky relationship with Allen.
Kelley's lawyer, Lowell, who an insider said she had known for years, served as pro-Clinton Democratic Party chief counsel on a House impeachment inquiry. Recently he won a partial acquittal and partial mistrial for John Edwards, a former Democratic U.S. senator and vice presidential candidate who had been indicted for misusing undeclared campaign funds to support his mistress.
During the Clinton sex scandal, Smith, a one-time press aide to President George H.W. Bush, served as Lewinsky's spokeswoman. Smith also represented NFL quarterback Michael Vick, who was charged and convicted in a dogfighting cruelty case.
Smith also is a model for the main character in the ABC-TV drama "Scandal," a prime-time series in which ace spin-doctor Olivia Pope, along with a team of spies and ex-convicts, not only manages to sort out or cover up sex and spy scandals but also carries on a secret affair with a fictional U.S. president.
Muse's senior partner, Jacob Stein, and another prominent criminal lawyer from a different firm, Plato Cacheris, represented Lewinsky personally in a criminal investigation of Clinton by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr and a congressional inquiry which led to Clinton's impeachment by the House of Representatives but subsequent acquittal by the Senate. Muse himself did not represent Lewinsky, according to Cacheris.
Starr and a substantial special prosecution team pursued Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. Starr turned his evidence over to the Republican-controlled House, which in a nationally televised broadcast impeached Clinton for high crimes and misdemeanors.
But Republicans could not muster the two-thirds majority in the Senate needed to remove Clinton from office. Republicans later were punished at the polls for what many of them conceded was a perceived overzealousness in pursuing Clinton.
CONGRESS WARY OF SPECTACLE
Lewinsky's lawyers were critical in helping her negotiate a legal thicket that included dealing with Starr's criminal investigators and the impeachment inquiry launched by Congress; she testified in both investigations. Lewinsky was also besieged for months by the media; eventually her team arranged decorous interviews with U.S. and British television networks.
Mindful of how the Lewinsky scandal played out, officials familiar with the views of both senior Democrats and Republicans in Congress say that congressional leaders are keen to avoid turning the scandal into a public extravaganza, even though there remain many unanswered questions.
If there are no public congressional hearings or a criminal prosecution, it is unclear what Broadwell's and Kelley's legal and public relations teams would do, apart from trying to manage news coverage and the hordes of paparazzi and TV cameramen now outside their clients' homes.
Lewinsky's lawyer, Cacheris, told Reuters that from what he could see, at this point Broadwell and Kelley do not know if there will be any charges against them. "These people are getting lawyers to ensure there is no criminal case," he added.
But Eric Dezenhall, a Washington crisis management expert, said some clients did not understand that there was a limit to how much even the most skilled lawyer and public relations specialist could do.
"You have to be very selective in the cases you take because you're going to end up with some very disgruntled clients," Dezenhall said.
(Editing by Warren Strobel and Paul Simao)
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