FBI agent’s tip brought down chief
Officer pulled from case after allegedly sending complainant racy pics
WASHINGTON— The FBI agent who launched the probe that eventually brought down CIA director David Petraeus was taken off the investigation over the summer due to concerns that he’d become personally involved in the case, the Wall Street Journal reported.
The investigation was triggered by Jill Kelley, a friend of Petraeus and his family, after she received harassing emails from Petraeus’s biographer and mistress, Paula Broadwell. Petraeus resigned last week after the affair, which was uncovered by the probe, came to light.
The FBI agent allegedly sent shirtless photos of himself to Kelley, 37, and tipped off a Republican congressman about the case. He is now under internal review by the FBI.
Frustrated and concerned that an inquiry into what he thought may be a possible national security breach had not progressed, the agent got in touch with the office of Rep. Dave Reichert, who passed on the information to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
Cantor said he contacted FBI director Robert Mueller on Oct. 31 and a week later, director of national intelligence James Clapper told Petraeus he needed to resign.
FBI agents on Monday night entered and searched Broadwell’s home, Bloomberg reported.
Petraeus told Broadwell last summer to stop sending the harassing emails after Kelley told him about them. Law enforcement officials said the emails indicated that Broadwell, 40, was jealous of Kelley’s friendship with Petraeus, 60.
His warning came about the same time he ended the affair with Broadwell.
In an interview on Monday, Kelley’s brother said his sister, a volunteer military liaison in Tampa, Fla., who is friends with Petraeus and his wife of 38 years, Holly, had no idea that her complaint to the FBI would lead to the end of Petraeus’s career.
It also appears Broadwell may have revealed classified information about an alleged CIA prison in Benghazi in a recent speech to her alma mater, the University of Denver.
In the address on Oct. 26 — weeks after she admitted the affair to the FBI — Broadwell claimed the CIA was holding several Libyan militia members prisoner in Benghazi.
The CIA denies holding any prisoners at the annex, telling reporters that Broadwell’s claims are false.
The FBI also reportedly found sensitive military information on Broadwell’s computer, but Petraeus has denied it came from him, and suggested to investigators she must have obtained it from other officials in Afghanistan when she spent time there.
The Senate Intelligence Commit- tee will also investigate why the FBI failed to immediately notify the White House and Congress when it discovered that Petraeus was involved in an affair. Petraeus met Broadwell in 2006 at Harvard, where she was a graduate student writing a dissertation on leadership. Broadwell eventually decided to turn her dissertation on leadership into a biography of the general, which was published earlier this year as All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. When they were apart, email served as their communication method of choice, with hundreds of messages passing between them through various and sometimes anonymous accounts. By late spring of this year, however, the relationship appeared headed for trouble. In Tampa, Kelley began receiving a series of what she described to a friend as bizarre emails from an anonymous account. They did not specifically cite Kelley’s connection to Petraeus, but warned that her friendship with him should stop or she would be exposed. Kelley was alarmed enough that in June she told a friend who worked as an FBI agent about them. Investigators traced the messages to Broadwell, who lives in Charlotte, N.C.
In examining her email account, investigators found messages from Petraeus of a highly personal nature. The FBI suspected the communications were being sent by someone who had hacked into the CIA director’s personal account.
The mistake apparently came in part from steps Petraeus and Broadwell took to conceal their relationship. According to The Associated Press, instead of sending emails to each other’s accounts, they composed messages, then left them in a “draft” folder where they could be accessed with a shared user name and password. The method, often used by terrorists, makes it harder to trace email traffic. But in this case, it may also have fuelled law enforcement concerns that a hacker was accessing the accounts. With files from Star wire services