Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., has called for a renewed investigation into potentially inappropriate emails exchanged between socialite Jill Kelley and Gen. John Allen.
"The fact that they didn't even pursue accessing the private e-mails is very disturbing to me," Speier said of the Pentagon's inspector general report on the matter, in an interview with USA Today. "Because it would suggest that it was an incomplete investigation at the very least. At the worst: [they were] intentionally not pursuing an investigation into whether or not there was an inappropriate relationship, secrecy, national-security breaches. Classified information."
The emails in question were the thousands of exchanges between Gen. Allen and Kelley. Kelley was pulled into the spotlight when she complained to the FBI about harassing emails, eventually revealed to have been sent by David Petraeus' biographer Paula Broadwell, which eventually led to revelations that Petraeus and Broadwell were having an affair.
From USA Today:
The FBI initially looked at Allen's case and referred it to the Pentagon for further review. The inspector general told Speier that Allen and Kelley exchanged 3,000 e-mails from July 2010 to July 2012 on his government account. Allen served at Central Command from 2008 until July 2011 when he became the top commander in Afghanistan. Of those e-mails, 41 were reviewed more thoroughly, Speier was told.
"So that's two years, 1,500 e-mails a year," Speier, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said. "I don't think I communicate with my husband by e-mail more than 150 times a year. That's a lot of e-mails. This is a four-star general in the middle of a war zone. The most disturbing part of my discussion with them was that they requested access to his private e-mail and were denied access and took it no further."
Since the Petraeus scandal broke, Kelley has sued the Pentagon and the FBI, alleging that after she filed a complaint about the Broadwell emails, both agencies violated the Kelleys’ privacy rights, leaked false and defamatory information, and generally engaged in “damaging leaks, cavalier sexual innuendo, old-fashioned 'blame the victim' discrimination, and other privacy violations and slander of the Kelleys by government officials [that] were not authorized conduct within the scope of those officials’ employment.”
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