Posts

Jill Kelley Says Paula Broadwell Tried to ‘Blackmail’ Her

/2 Comments/in /by

Jill Kelley was not the first to see the anonymous email that would rupture her comfortable life as a wealthy Tampa socialite who forged friendships with two top American generals.

She learned of the mysterious message from her husband, Scott, who opened the note on his iPhone, under the Yahoo account they share, as he was about to board a plane.

Kelley says she was “terrified” late last summer when he told her about the email. In that note and the barrage that followed, “there was blackmail, extortion, threats,” Kelley told me in her first interview since the David Petraeus scandal erupted, breaking a silence of nearly three months.

These emails, as Kelley would later learn along with the rest of the world, were from Paula Broadwell, whose affair with Petraeus triggered his resignation as CIA director. But the writer was so ambiguous, says Kelley, that “I didn’t even know it was a female.”

Contradicting virtually every published account of the saga, Kelley indicates that the anonymous emails did not warn her to stay away from Petraeus, as is commonly assumed. And yet the press depicted the two of them as “romantic rivals. Think how bizarre that is,” Kelley says.

Read more from this story HERE.

Jill Kelly Hits Back, Demands Investigation Into Leaks

/0 Comments/in , /by

A Tampa socialite embroiled in the scandal that cost CIA Director David Petraeus his job fought back Tuesday after more than two weeks of silence as her attorneys released emails, telephone recordings and other material that they say show she never tried to exploit her friendship with Petraeus.

Jill Kelley, through her attorneys, went on the attack against a New York businessman who accused her of incompetence in her work trying to set up a deal he was negotiating with South Korean companies; an attorney who accused her of name-dropping and of being a social climber; and the FBI agent who first leaked her name in connection with the Petraeus scandal.

Kelley, 37, became the focus of national media attention earlier this month after it was revealed that she was the recipient of anonymous emails from Paula Broadwell, Petraeus’ biographer and mistress.

Broadwell allegedly told Kelley she should stay away from the former general and Gen. John Allen, who had replaced Petraeus as leader of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Petraeus and Allen had become friends with Kelley and her husband, Scott Kelley, a noted cancer surgeon, when the generals served at U.S. Central Command, which is headquartered at Tampa’s MacDill Air Force Base. Kelley became an unofficial social ambassador for the base, hosting numerous parties for the officers.

The scandal this week cost Kelley her appointment as an honorary consul for the South Korean government, which she had gotten because of her friendship with Petraeus. The Koreans said she had misused the title in her personal business dealings.

Kelley’s attorneys sent a cease-and-desist letter to New York businessman Adam Victor; a complaint to the Florida bar against Tampa attorney Barry Cohen, and a letter to the U.S. Attorney’s Office demanding that it investigate to find out who in the FBI leaked her name to the news media. Representatives of attorney Abbe Lowell emailed copies of the letters to The Associated Press.

Read more from this story HERE.

FBI Agent Yanked From Petraeus Investigation After “Growing Obsessed” With Other Woman in Probe

/3 Comments/in /by

A federal agent was pulled off the investigation into David Petraeus’s illicit contact with Paula Broadwell when the agent reportedly became obsessed with another woman involved in the probe, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The FBI found that the agent had sent shirtless photos of himself to Jill Kelley, the Tampa woman who reportedly received a half dozen emails from Broadwell that warned Kelley to stay away from Petraeus. The emails were sent from anonymous accounts.

That same agent was a friend of Kelley’s and he had started the FBI investigation into the emails — which eventually led to Petraeus’s downfall — after Kelley came to him for help upon receiving the anonymous threats. The FBI declined to identify the agent, who is now under an internal investigation by the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility.

After Kelley, a married mother of three, told the agent about the emails, he referred the matter to a cyber crimes unit. Shortly thereafter, the agent was barred from the case over concerns that he ‘might have grown obsessed with the matter,’ the Journal reports.

Even after he was prohibited from involvement in the case, the agent decided to contact a member of Congress, Republican David Reichert, about the matter. He complained that senior FBI officials were going to ‘sweep the matter under the rug,’ the FBI learned.

Read more from this story HERE.

Petraeus Mistress Claimed Benghazi Annex Held Jihadist Prisoners

/1 Comment/in , /by

The Central Intelligence Agency denied charges Sunday that its annex in Benghazi, Libya secretly held a few jihadi prisoners until it was destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2012 attack. Paula Broadwell, the girlfriend then-CIA chief Gen. David Petraeus, made that claim during an Oct. 26 speech in Denver, Colo.

“I don’t know if a lot of you have heard this, but the CIA annex had actually had taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner. And they think that the attack on the consulate was an effort to try to get these prisoners back,” Broadwell declared during the speech, at the University of Denver.

“That’s still being vetted,” she added.

The CIA’s denial came just hours after Arutz Sheva, an Israeli news outlet, first published a partial transcript of Broadwell’s speech. By midnight Sunday, intelligence reporters with both The Daily Beast and The Washington Post were reporting and tweeting, respectively, that the CIA said her claim was false.

An agency spokesperson told The Daily Beast that “[t]he CIA has not had detention authority since January 2009, when Executive Order 13491 was issued. Any suggestion that the Agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless.”

Read more from this story HERE.