The Left Was Correct About "Betraeus"

This particular article by Michael Isikoff via Yahoo News should whet your appetite... and there's plenty more like it out there giving further details.

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David Petraeus learned the hard way the truth of an old Washington adage: It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up that will bring you down.

Two weeks before he resigned as CIA director, Petraeus lied to the FBI, falsely denying that he had provided highly classified information — including the identities of covert officers in Afghanistan — to his biographer, Paula Broadwell, according to court documents filed Tuesday.

The court documents, filed in North Carolina today as part of Petraeus’ guilty plea to mishandling classified information, help explain the FBI’s aggressive pursuit of the former CIA director since he resigned on Nov. 9, 2012, over what he acknowledged then was an extramarital affair with Broadwell.

The documents state that Petraeus, after stepping down as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2011 and before being sworn in at the CIA, had given Broadwell eight so-called “black books” — bound five-by-eight-inch notebooks containing “the identities of covert officers, war strategy” and other classified information, including “quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council meetings” — according to a 14-page “factual basis” for his guilty plea signed by Petraeus and his lawyers. (The notebooks, which included Petraeus’ personal notes and daily schedules, are so named because they have black covers.)

Broadwell had inquired about the black books while writing a book about Petraeus, asking him about them during a Aug. 4, 2011, conversation that she recorded.

“By the way, where are your black books?” she asked. “We never went through …”

Petraeus at first appeared to demur, stating, “Um, they’re really — I mean, they are highly classified, some of them … I mean, there’s code word stuff in there.” (Broadwell is not identified by name in the document, only described as Petraeus’ biographer.)

But later that month, on Aug. 27, 2011, Petraeus sent Broadwell an email agreeing to give her the black books.

The next day, he personally delivered them to her at a private residence in Washington, D.C., “in order to facilitate his biographer’s access to the black books,” according to the court documents and the source material in them for use in the book, “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus,” which was published in 2012.

Petraeus retrieved the black books four days later, on Sept. 1, 2011 — just five days before he started at the CIA — and took them to his home. No classified information from the books was used in Broadwell’s biography, the court documents state.

But they proved to be his undoing nonetheless. In 2012, FBI agents began investigating Petraeus after receiving complaints from a South Florida woman that she was receiving menacing emails from a woman who turned out to be Broadwell.

Interviewed by two FBI agents at CIA headquarters on Oct. 26, 2012, and questioned about his handling of classified information, Petraeus stated that “he had never provided any classified information” to Broadwell nor helped facilitate her access to classified material.

* HAVING READ THIS ARTICLE... SHOULDN'T PETRAEUS BE BEHIND BARS... PERHAPS AWAITING A FIRING SQUAD...???

* INSTEAD... OBAMA'S "JUSTICE DEPARTMENT" IS ALLOWING HIM TO COP TO A MISDEMEANOR.

* FOLKS... I HAVE NO DOUBT THIS IS HOW OBAMA (AND CLINTON) BOUGHT BETRAEUS' SILENCE ON BENGHAZI.