Politics

Who's Going to Get Fired Over Petraeus Investigation?

So retired Gen. David Petraeus has resigned as CIA director in the wake of revelations of an affair and crazy email behavior on his part and that of his lover.

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So retired Gen. David Petraeus has resigned as CIA director in the wake of revelations of an affair and crazy email behavior on his part and that of his lover. That Petraeus cashiered himself just as he was about to testify before Congress about the total botch job surrounding the September 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya is disturbing for about a thousand reasons.

Yesterday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that she and others in the Senate had no idea that the FBI was investigating Petraeus until he resigned. The White House has said they didn't know about the investigation until Election Day. The director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, says the Department of Justice told him about the investigation on 5pm on Election Day.

Which led Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) to say:

"It seems this (the investigation) has been going on for several months and, yet, now it appears that they're saying that the FBI didn't realize until Election Day that General Petraeus was involved. It just doesn't add up," said King, R-N.Y.

More here.

Is it plausible that FBI Director Robert Mueller didn't tell the president that his team was investigating the head of the CIA, long understood as a rival agency? Or that Mueller himself didn't know? That Obama didn't know until so late in the game? Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) has claimed he'd heard rumors about the investigation over the summer. None of the possible explanations are particularly comforting. Either folks were pulling on strings independent of oversight, which is scary but believable. Or they were informing their superiors all along, which means that a bunch of higher-ups in the White House and various security committees in Congress are bullshitting when they claim ignorance. Also scary but believable.

Whatever truth outs - and here's hoping that the press, relieved of its duty of protecting Obama in his bid for re-election, gets cracking on all sorts of investigative stories - there better be some kind of serious repucussions here. The most transparent administration in history is once again revealed to be as clear as a glass of water pulled from the mighty Mississippi.