How did the CIA become the hero in the Benghazi talking point controversy? And if the CIA is part of Team Obama, why hasn't it enjoyed as much scrutiny as everyone else involved? One reason is the political skills of David Petraeus, as behind-the-scenes emails continue to reveal.
To be clear: There are not three scandals plaguing the Obama White House. By embracing the leaked talking points, Obama's opponents may have taken Benghazi off the table completely.
It's been nearly five months since David Petraeus stepped down as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency after revealing his affair with biographer and acolyte Paula Broadwell, and now Petraeus wants to say he's sorry.
The Guardian and BBC Arabic just released a blockbuster story, linking David Petraeus to two veteran advisors of El Salvadorean paramilitary squads who ran Iraqi interrogation centers that exacerbated the country's sectarian violence.
President Obama accepted the general's request to retire from the military, instead of going forward with his nomination to be supreme commander of NATO, and now the scandal has ended the careers of two very high-ranking national security officials.
You'd think that if Kelley would "want to put the controversy behind her" she would stop complaining to one of the nation's biggest media reporters.
And his nomination to lead NATO forces is back on track.
Over two months after allegations surfaced that he'd carried on an inappropriate relationship with Jill Kelley, the Tampa socialite at the center of the Petraeus scandal, General John Allen is off the hook.
The defense secretary owns a golden retriever — code name: Bravo; real name: Bravo — who, besides witnessing first-paw the CIA's plans to hunt down Osama bin Laden, is way better at keeping secrets than the disgraced former CIA chief.
The Washington Post's Bob Woodward today offers a fascinating look into how Roger Ailes doesn't just reflect so much as try to shape the Republican Party. But the question remains: Does Fox's behind-the-scenes political power actually work?
What a world it would have been had Roger Ailes gotten his way last year, when he recruited one of his Fox News lieutenants to talk David Petraeus into running against Obama in 2012.
It was hard not to be just skeptical Thursday morning, when his longtime friend released Petraeus's beautifully handwritten letter of contrition and gave a few news outlets an interview about it.
She has resurfaced, looking a little more smoothed and puffed since we saw her last, claiming Bill Clinton called her in 2005 and offering her advice for Paula Broadwell.
Three of the five stars of the Love Pentagon saga have hired high-powered fancy lawyers to help them emerge from the smoldering scandalous ruins. Let's look at what kind of lawyers will do the selling.
Paula Broadwell had ambitions beyond being the lady who wrote David Petraeus' biography. According to a report in the New York Post's Page 6, Broadwell was trying to leverage her book fame into becoming a TV regular, or an elected official.
Jill Kelley's seemingly endless charms got her into the White House three times this fall.
Former CIA director David Petraeus snuck into the sub-basement of the Capitol building today to testify in front of two closed-door Congressional hearings about what he and his agency knew about the Benghazi embassy attacks.
Jonathan Freedland on Gaza, Jacey Eckhart on military marriages, Daniel Gross on the payroll tax, Christina Larson on Hu Jintao, and Eugene Robinson on Republicans' listening problem.
The sprawling Love Pentagon investigation into the private emails of ex-CIA director David Petraeus, his mistress-biographer Paula Broadwell, and Gen. John Allen has caused multiple reporters to note the irony that our massive surveillance state has started eating itself. It is not yet sated.
Defenders of the FBI agent who emailed a shirtless photo of himself to Jill Kelley said the image was a joke. Now that it's been leaked to The Seattle Times's Mike Carter, we understand why.
Ezra Klein on tax reform, Alex Pareene on Republican rebranding, Amy Davidson on military sex scandals, Emer O'Toole on Savita, and Stephen Gandel on Goldman Sachs.
When Paula Broadwell wrote on Facebook, "Can anyone introduce me to Lance Armstrong?" it was not social-climbing, but birthday shopping.
The Love Pentagon did not start with Paula Broadwell sending emails to Jill Kelley, but with her emailing a warning under the alias "KelleyPatrol" to Gen. John Allen in Afghanistan.
Just a couple days after we learned about a nameless FBI agent who launched the investigation that eventually uncovered David Petraeus's extramarital affair, we know that agent's name: Frederick W. Humphries II.
Not to be outdone by the moved-up release of a book on former CIA director David Petraeus, Penguin has announced plans to roll out the delayed memoir of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan who Petraeus replaced.
Let's be honest, this Petraeus thing is just odd. So odd that we are having trouble giving it a name because it's an undulating charybdis of adultery, ill logic, adults acting stupid, and embarrassment involving people who are supposed to be the most upstanding Americans in the country. And we were wondering how this mess looks to everyone who doesn't live here.
On Friday, the bottom fell out on the news cycle. After the election, we really thought we were in for weeks heaped on top of weeks of Fiscal Cliff sorting, explaining and whatnot. And then there was this shiny Petraeus scandal which was gifted from the gods of slow news days, which now involves showrunners from Law And Order SVU. Wait what?
You could call it "an embarrassment," or "amusing," a "soap opera," a "four-star farce," or "the most dramatic rose ceremony yet." You could call it, as Paula Broadwell did (for her book), All In: The Education of General David Petraeus. You could call it a conspiracy, or just like high school. But you're going to have to call it something.
Jill Kelley does not appreciate the flood of attention she's been receiving since the investigation into David Petraeus's affair -- the one that she started -- captivated the nation.
While we all gush over the juicy details of David Petraeus's infidelity, some are expressing concern about what this tells us about online privacy. If it was so easy to get access to Petraeus's Gmail account, what does that mean for the rest of us?, one commenter wonders.
While David Petraeus's sexy email scandal has given us many things—a clearer picture of Petraeus's public relations machine, insight into the military-industrial-housewife complex, the understanding that 60-year-olds are no more responsible about sexy Internet use than are tweens—we still don't understand where it came from.
As many before us have remarked, this whole David Petraeus (and beyond) sex scandal plays like something out of Homeland. Or, y'know, Melrose Place. So how would it all go down (heh)? Let's plan the first three seasons of All In.
How could Gen. John Allen be such great pen pals with Jill Kelley that they exchanged 20,000 to 30,000 pages of emails? An Allen defender says they were not involved ("Allen has never been alone with Jill Kelley") and that number has been wildly overstated.
Defenders of both ex-CIA director David Petraeus and Gen. John Allen deny they were romantically involved with Jill Kelley, and even if that's true, the lady sure knew how to pull strings.
Andrew Ross Sorkin on J.C. Penney, Jon Lee Anderson on Petraeus, Michael Tomasky on the death of Reaganomics, Saransh Sehgal on Tibet, and Christine Ockrent on François Hollande.
A summary of the best reads found behind the paywall of The New York Times.
Information continues to emerge in the increasingly complicated, increasingly tawdry, and entirely all-consuming news story of what at first seemed like a "relatively" simple affair between former CIA head David Petraeus and his biographer Paula Broadwell. But let's pause for a moment and talk about one very special sentence in the affair.
General John Allen, the man who succeeded David Petraeus as the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, reportedly sent hundreds of "potentially inappropriate" emails to one of the women involved in the scandal that led to Petraeus' resignation from the CIA.
With a characteristically impassioned rant about David Petraeus's career, Michael Hastings made himself the star of Piers Morgan Tonight on Monday.
The rapidly unfolding saga of David Petraeus, Paula Broadwell, Jill Kelley and an unnamed FBI agent is getting trashier by the minute.
A four-star general, his eager biographer, an FBI probe, another "other woman," a disgraced resignation—as one commenter notes, General Petraeus' affair is a Hollywood blockbuster that practically writes itself.
"At the C.I.A., [adultery] can be a security issue, since it can make an intelligence officer vulnerable to blackmail, but it is not a crime," write Scott Shane and Charlie Savage in the New York Times. Adultery can also sell books, particularly when the book is a gushingly reverential ode to the subject with whom the writer is said to be having an affair.
While the resignation of former CIA director David Petraeus seemed rather abrupt to everybody else, a number of higher ups in the government have been sitting on the revelation about the retired general's affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell since late summer.
Yesterday we found out Paula Broadwell was reported to the FBI for harassing a mystery female friend of David Petraeus and that led the FBI to discover the affair while investigating her inbox. We now know the identity of the mystery woman.
New reports coming out about the affair between former CIA director David Petraeus and his biographer Paula Broadwell reveal there was a third woman involved that led the FBI to discover the affair.
Cracks are beginning to show in the Obama administration's united front on the Benghazi consulate attack with some officials shifting blame to CIA director David Petraeus.
If a puzzling political story shows up on the Drudge Report, you might be inclined to believe that Matt Drudge is looking to help Mitt Romney. But for conservatives pondering his report of David Petraeus being on the V.P. shortlist, this was some chicanery that goes all the way back to Obama.
Another late night incident for Shia LaBeouf, a chilly White House reception for former Clinton aides, and Michael Bloomberg's television viewing habits.
You can't win the Republican presidential nomination without talking to the Fox News chief
The CIA Director delivers remarks on the group's viability to a committee hearing
Petraeus wrote the top-selling counterinsurgency manual
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