Last night, WaPo reported that the FBI is still trying to figure out how Paula Broadwell got classified information they found on her computer and–it looks like–in her home.

The FBI is making a new push to determine how a woman who had an affair with retired Gen. David H. Petraeus when he was CIA director obtained classified files, part of an expanding series of investigations in a scandal that also threatens the career of the United States’ top military commander in Afghanistan.

Senior law enforcement officials said that a late-night seizure on Monday of boxes of material from the North Carolina home of Paula Broadwell, a Petraeus biographer whose affair with him led to his resignation last week, marks a renewed focus by investigators on sensitive material found in her possession.

“The issue of national security is still on the table,” one U.S. law enforcement official said. Both Petraeus and Broadwell have denied to investigators that he was the source of any classified information, officials said.

The surprise move by the FBI follows assertions by U.S. officials that the investigation had turned up no evidence of a security breach — a factor that was cited as a reason the Justice Department did not notify the White House before last week that the CIA director had been ensnared in an e-mail inquiry.

As the WaPo correctly points out, this new investigative push is surprising, because the FBI has already been blabbing for several days that no charges would be filed.

Which is why I find it strange that Matthew Miller made this claim in a column arguing the FBI has handled the Petraeus investigation properly:

In this case, it appears the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation handled the matter entirely in keeping with those rules and precedents. And, importantly, they passed the most crucial test faced whenever the department investigates a senior member of the existing administration: They conducted the entire investigation without playing favorites and without a hint of political interference.

While it’s not the central thrust of Miller’s piece (whether or not Congress should have been informed is), it’s too soon to know whether DOJ is playing favorites or not. But up until this latest report from WaPo, it appeared they were playing favorites.

After all, DOJ charged people–like Thomas Drake–for retaining unclassified information, information he had been directed by the Inspector General to retain. DOD charged Bradley Manning with retaining classified information.

Retaining classified information improperly is a crime, even if you have clearance to view the information.

Sure, it’s usually used as a proxy for other crimes for which no evidence exists. Or, in the case of Drake, in an effort to get him to plead guilty to other crimes.

But if DOJ is going to use it as a tool to persecute leakers, there is no reason it should exempt General Petraeus’ one-time mistress.

I’m not saying I want Broadwell to be charged, nor am I saying I think DOJ’s use of such charges in the past is proper. But that’s the problem with witch hunts, isn’t it? They either stick out as arbitrary political prosecutions, or they set a standard that few in the national security establishment could meet.

Update: Ut oh. Broadwell might get herself in trouble after all.

A computer used by Paula Broadwell, the woman whose affair with CIA director General David Petraeus led to his resignation, contained substantial classified information that should have been stored under more secure conditions, law enforcement and national security officials said on Wednesday.

The contents of the classified material and how Broadwell acquired it remain under investigation, said the officials. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to comment publicly.

But the quantity of classified material found on the computer was significant enough to warrant a continuing investigation, the officials told Reuters.

Though it sounds like they’re only contemplating stripping her security clearance.

Law enforcement officials also have said that they believe the continuing FBI probe into the matter is likely to end without criminal charges. If Broadwell is found to have mishandled classified information, she could face action under administrative security regulations.

Which would mean they’re striking a middle ground between treating her as they’ve treated others and retaliating against her for getting the sainted Petraeus in trouble (because of course grown men never get themselves in trouble).

Update: CNN now reporting that Broadwell has had her security clearance revoked.

There’s a critical sub-genre of reporting on the Petraeus scandal, noting that Petraeus’ sins don’t so much pertain to fucking a dissertation advisee under his desk, but sending lots of men and women to die in his pet failed military strategies.

Of course there’s Michael Hastings’ focus on Petraeus’ successful spin of his failures.

Here’s a brief summary: We can start with the persistent questions critics have raised about his Bronze Star for Valor. Or that, in 2004, during the middle of a presidential election, Petraeus wrote an op-ed in The Washington Postsupporting President Bush and saying that the Iraq policy was working. The policy wasn’t working, but Bush repaid the general’s political advocacy by giving him the top job in the war three years later.

There’s his war record in Iraq, starting when he headed up the Iraqi security force training program in 2004. He’s more or less skated on that, including all the weapons he lost, the insane corruption, and the fact that he essentially armed and trained what later became known as “Iraqi death squads.” On his final Iraq tour, during the so-called “surge,” he pulled off what is perhaps the most impressive con job in recent American history. He convinced the entire Washington establishment that we won the war. [my emphasis]

There’s Michael Cohen’s examination of Petraeus’ role in both the Iraqi and Afghan surge.

The greatest indictment of Petraeus’s record is that, 18 months after announcing the surge, President Obama pulled the plug on a military campaign that had clearly failed to realize the ambitious goals of Petraeus and his merry team of COIN boosters. Today, the Afghanistan war is stalemated with little hope of resolution – either militarily or politically – any time soon. While that burden of failure falls hardest on President Obama, General Petraeus is scarcely blameless. Yet, to date, he has almost completely avoided examination for his conduct of the war in Afghanistan.

But I want to look at Petraeus booster David Ignatius’ take. His post today is barely critical of Petraeus. But it acknowledges that Petraeus’ CIA has been too focused on paramilitary ops to the detriment of human collection, which proved to be a fatal failure in Benghazi.

Petraeus was picked for the job, and eager to take it, partly because the White House believed that in an era of counterterrorism, the CIA’s traditional mission of stealing secrets was morphing into a wider role that increasingly stressed paramilitary covert action. The retired general, with his matchless experience in running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was seen as well-suited to run an agency that combined the trench coat and the flak jacket.

But the Petraeus-era CIA had a hidden defect, quite apart from any errant e-mails, which was that the paramilitary covert-action function was swallowing alive the old-fashioned intelligence-gathering side of the house. This actually seems to me to be the central lesson of the disaster in Benghazi, Libya.

[snip]

Benghazi showed the reason the United States needs clandestine intelligence officers in dangerous countries such as Libya. They’re in country, undercover, to collect the secrets that will keep U.S. citizens safe. That night, the United States needed to know what was going down in Benghazi, and in Cairo, Tunis and a half-dozen other capitals. It’s hard to do this intelligence collection — recruiting and running clandestine agents — when you’re operating from a quasi-public base, as seems to have been the case in Benghazi, and is certainly true in many others parts of the world.

[snip]

But one resolution for the post-Petraeus CIA should be to put intelligence collection back in the driver’s seat at the agency. Maybe this will only be possible when the agency fully deploys a new network of deep-cover “platforms” that can hide CIA officers better than that embattled annex in Benghazi did. [my emphasis]

I think Ignatius is totally right. Petraeus responded to Benghazi by asking for more drones, rather than reapplying CIA to collecting information on the militias who ended up attacking us. But one of the lessons of Benghazi is we need to know who we’re dealing with–all the people, not just the people we’ve identified as bad guys, and not just the information we can collect from drones or (hahahaha!) email and social media.

There’s an additional intriguing criticism of Petraeus Ignatius alludes to. He comes as close as anyone has to suggesting CIA–David Petraeus’ CIA–was the entity training the militias to be more professional soldiers.

The CIA had a big base in Benghazi, with a half-dozen former military special forces assigned there as part of the “Global Response Staff.” These were the muscle-bound security guys known to flippant earlier generations of CIA case officers as “knuckle-draggers.” They were in Benghazi in such numbers in part because the CIA was trying to collect the shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles that had gone loose after the fall of Col. Moammar Gaddafi. They may also have been working with Libyan militias to help them become effective security forces. [my emphasis]

Given suggestions that the February 17 Brigade–one of the militia we would have been training–at least failed to prevent the attack if not allowed it to happen, the suggestion CIA conducted their training is really damning indeed.

After all, as Hastings notes, Petraeus’ training program in Iraq effectively armed Iraqi death squads. As Jim has tracked forever, Petraeus’ training program in Afghanistan ended up training those Afghan forces who are now killing NATO forces.

David Petraeus has a fairly consistent history of training sketchy men to be fairly dangerous troops. Increasingly of late, precisely those American-trained forces are the people killing Americans.

If, along with everything else, CIA trained some of the people who failed to protect and perhaps even attacked Americans in Benghazi, it would be the third time Petraeus’ training has backfired. Couple that with the failure to collect HUMINT on people we didn’t know were bad guys, and we got blindsided in Benghazi. And that’s just hitting some of the problems.

Ignatius is right: Benghazi teaches us CIA needs to go back to collecting information on what people–both identified enemies and relatively trusted friends–are doing. And until we get far better at doing that, we sure as hell better not be arming and training these people.

Because there’s an increasing history of Petraeus’ programs training the men who kill Americans.

Here’s the first inkling of something Jim and I have been speculating about: that Jill Kelley may have some tie to intelligence, which led the FBI to take Paula Broadwell’s harassing emails to her more seriously.

A military officer who is a former member of Petraeus’s staff said Kelley was a “self-appointed” go-between for Central Command officers with Lebanese and other Middle Eastern government officials. She was a fixture at social and charity events involving Central Command officials in Tampa.

Add that to the news that DOD learned of General Allen’s emails with Kelley via his NATO command vetting. Why would FBI, in the course of such vetting, be reading Allen’s emails in the first place unless Kelley had become some kind of trigger? (Indeed, it may not be–or not just be–that some of the emails included flirtation.)

If Kelley had some tie with intelligence, then it would explain why the FBI investigated a catfight, particularly given Broadwell’s comments indicating close awareness of Petraeus’ location. And it would explain why this got escalated into a National Security concern so quickly. And it would explain why Kelley thinks she needs the assistance of Abbe Lowell.

Three years and one day before FBI briefed DNI Clapper about the questionable email practices of David Petraeus, and less than three years before FBI alerted Leon Panetta to John Allen’s perhaps less questionable email practices, an Army officer who had been the subject of a 6-month investigation into his questionable emails killed 13 people and wounded another 29 at Fort Hood, TX.

While a number of people are criticizing the FBI (rightly, in the case of the agent who reportedly made this investigation his or her own personal project) for being out of control in the investigation that started with Jill Kelley’s email, I’d like to put the FBI’s decision to inform Petraeus’ and Allen’s superiors about their emails in the context of the failure to stop Nidal Hasan.

I don’t mean to suggest that Petraeus and Allen’s smutty emails to some beautiful middle aged housewives equate to an Army psychiatrist writing a radical anti-American cleric. At least given what we know, there were far more serious red flags in Hasan’s emails to Anwar al-Awlaki than there were in Petraeus’ love notes to Paula Broadwell (though Petraeus’ use of counter-surveillance techniques would, by themselves, be a red flag).

But the point is–and one key lesson of the failure to stop Hasan–is that the FBI can’t always know how important inappropriate email contacts are without talking to a person’s superiors. If they had done with Hasan what they did here–inform the officer’s superiors after concluding no criminal behavior had taken place (which is what they concluded with Hasan)–they might have learned of the more troubling context behind the emails.

Besides, the most damaging leak, today’s stories revealing a huge chunk of Allen emails that may be flirtatious but in no way problematic, came from a senior US defense official, not the FBI. There were surely more appropriate ways to delay Allen’s confirmation hearing later this week, but that decision was presumably DOD’s, not FBI’s.

Carrie Johnson captures some of the other disclosure issues FBI faced. But the question as to why FBI informed Clapper and Panetta can be answered, IMO, by pointing to lessons learned with the Nidal Hasan case. FBI almost certainly had no reason to doubt Petraeus and Allen. But I don’t blame FBI for not wanting to make the final decisions about how this email behavior affected the Generals’ fitness to command.

ABC follows up on the point I made yesterday–that Congress is now getting interested in David Petraeus’ October 31 trip to Egypt and, we now find out, Libya–and reveals that he now doesn’t want to testify about his trip.

In late October, Petraeus traveled to Libya to conduct his own review of the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

While in Tripoli, he personally questioned the CIA station chief and other CIA personnel who were in Benghazi on Sept. 11 when the attack occurred.

The Libya stop was part of a six nation trip to the region. Petraeus intended the review as a way to prepare for his upcoming testimony before Congress on Benghazi.

[snip]

But now Petraeus is telling friends he does not think he should testify.

Petraeus has offered two reasons for wanting to avoid testifying: Acting CIA Director Morell is in possession of all the information Petraeus gathered in conducting his review and he has more current information gathered since Petraeus’ departure; and it would be a media circus.

So David Petraeus, after charging taxpayers for the cost to take his own plane to the Middle East to prepare for this testimony, doesn’t want to deliver it himself, preferring instead to let Acting Director Mike Morell tell secondhand about what Petraeus learned on that very expensive fact-finding trip?

Note, ABC doesn’t question CIA’s claim that they can’t hand over the trip report to the intelligence committees because it’s not done yet, in spite of Dianne Feinstein’s complaints yesterday about someone else having already read a copy of it.

Which leads me to believe Petraeus wants to prevent or delay Congress from getting this information in the first place.

To get an idea of what Petraeus might want to withhold from Congress, let’s take a look at the CIA timeline (using David Ignatius’ apparent transcription of it), which was based on a briefing while Petraeus was still overseas. The timing means it’s unclear whether this incorporated some of what Petraeus learned while there, or whether the CIA released this timeline before Petraeus got back, effectively deliberately giving the press outdated information. Moreover, it’s possible Petraeus had others deliver the timeline so his own credibility wouldn’t be impacted if it turned out to be false.

Of all the timeline bullet points, Petraeus’ personal interviews with the station chief and other CIA personnel would have resolved one of the key details that remains contested: why CIA waited 24 minuets before heading to the Mission to rescue Chris Stevens.

10:04 p.m.: A six-person rescue squad from the agency’s Global Response Staff (GRS) leaves in two vehicles. The team leader is a career CIA officer; the team includes a contractor named Tyrone Woods, who later died. During the previous 24-minute interval, the CIA base chief calls the February 17 Brigade, other militias and the Libyan intelligence service seeking vehicles with .50-caliber machine guns. Nobody responds. The team leader and the base chief agree at 10:04 that they can’t wait any longer, and the squad heads for the consulate.

The senior intelligence official said that he doesn’t know whether Woods or any of the other team members agitated to go sooner but added that he wouldn’t be surprised. “I want them to have a sense of urgency,” he said. [my emphasis]

Note, the CIA timeline here doesn’t really answer one key allegation made by Fox, that the Global Response Staff were told to wait before going to rescue the Mission employees. And it conveniently blames the Libyan militia–the one party to the rescue who will likely not have representatives in the closed testimony this week–for the delay.

Now consider what the WSJ reported in its much more balanced version of the CIA timeline: After the attack, CIA claimed State had misunderstood CIA’s obligation to protect the Mission.

Congressional investigators say it appears that the CIA and State Department weren’t on the same page about their respective roles on security, underlining the rift between agencies over taking responsibility and raising questions about whether the security arrangement in Benghazi was flawed.

[snip]

Protecting the CIA annex was a roughly 10-man security force. The State Department thought it had a formal agreement with the CIA that called for that force to be used in emergencies to bolster security for the consulate.

The State Department has been criticized by lawmakers and others for failing to provide adequate security for its ambassador, especially in light of an attack there in June and after other violence prompted the U.K. to pull out of the city. In October, Mrs. Clinton took responsibility for any security lapses.

Among U.S. diplomatic officials in Libya, the nearby CIA force and the secret agreement allayed concerns about security levels.

“They were the cavalry,” a senior U.S. official said of the CIA team, adding that CIA’s backup security was an important factor in State’s decision to maintain a consulate there.

There’s also the intriguing detail that Hillary called Petraeus to make sure they were on the same page.

At one point during the consulate siege, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telephoned the CIA director directly to seek assistance.

[snip]

At 5:41 p.m. Eastern time, Mrs. Clinton called Mr. Petraeus. She wanted to make sure the two agencies were on the same page.

The timing of this would place it at 11:41 Benghazi time, just as the CIA team was leaving the Mission without Chris Stevens. But it is interesting that Hillary made that call.

There are other details where the State timeline and CIA timeline conflict, notably as to the identity of the people who ran into the burning safe haven to look for Stevens’ body, with both agencies claiming their own people made heroic attempts to find Stevens.

It looks like Petraeus would have answers to a lot of key questions, but he’d rather Morell give them.

And remember, at the same time as CIA orchestrated this oddly-timed briefing, Scott Shane was writing a valedictory to Petraeus’ untarnished image. As with the briefing, I’m wondering how much of that story relied on information Petraeus learned while on his very expensive fact-finding trip.

Another giant shoe has dropped in L’Affaire Petraeus. Not simply more specifics, but yet another General:

Gen. John Allen, the top American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, is under investigation for what a senior defense official said early Tuesday was “inappropriate communication’’ with Jill Kelley, the woman in Tampa who was seen as a rival for David H. Petraeus’s attentions by Paula Broadwell, the woman who had an extramarital affair with Mr. Petraeus.

In a statement released to reporters on his plane en route to Australia early Tuesday, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said that the F.B.I. had informed him on Sunday of its investigation of General Allen.

Mr. Panetta turned the matter over to the Pentagon’s inspector general to conduct its own investigation into what the defense official said were 20,000 to 30,000 pages of documents, many of them e-mails between General Allen and Ms. Kelley, who is married with children.

Really, at this point, what can you even say about the secret storm soap opera that roils within the rarified brass air of the US Military? This was just the last hit for a night that saw the emergence of the Shirtless FBI Guy (now under investigation himself by the Office of Professional Responsibility at DOJ) to a nightime search of Paula Broadwell’s home by the FBI.

There are too many tentacles, evolving too quickly, to go too deep on all the facts that have rolled out even in the last twelve hours. But the General Allen/Jill Kelley bit is fascinating. Remember, the handful of emails Paula Broadwell sent to Kelley reportedly did not mention Petraeus by name. This latest report at least raises the possibility Broadwell was referring to an inappropriate relationship between Kelley and Allen, and not Kelley and Petraeus. I am not saying such is the case, but it is also arguably consistent with the currently known substance of Broadwell’s emails to Kelley, so the question is valid to be raised.

A couple of other data points to note. First, Broadwell’s father made a somewhat cryptic comment yesterday that may be being explained now:

“This is about something else entirely, and the truth will come out,” he told the Daily News.

“There is a lot more that is going to come out … You wait and see. There’s a lot more here than meets the eye.”

He said that his daughter, who’s at the center of the controversy that prompted CIA director David Petraeus to resign from his post, is a victim of character assassination, and that there’s something much bigger lurking behind the curtain.

Second, as I noted early yesterday morning, Jill Kelley has hired some of the most astoundingly powerful criminal defense and PR help imaginable:

They hired Abbe Lowell, a Washington lawyer who has represented clients such as former presidential candidate John Edwards and lobbyist Jack Abramoff. And the couple are employing crisis PR person Judy Smith, who has represented big names like Monica Lewinsky, Michael Vick and Kobe Bryant.

Now, let’s be honest, an innocent recipient of a handful of crank non-threatening emails, as Kelley was commonly portrayed when her name first came out, does NOT need that kind of heavy hitter professional service. Seriously, Abbe Lowell is not only a great attorney, he is as preeminent a counsel as exists for spook and national security defense cases. No one in their right mind pays for that unless they need it, especially 1,000 miles away from his office.

Another oddity occurred last night: The North Carolina home of Paula Broadwell was searched for nearly four hours by a full on execution team from the FBI. From the New York Times:

On Monday night, F.B.I. agents went to Ms. Broadwell’s home in Charlotte, N.C., and were seen carrying away what several reporters at the scene said were boxes of documents. A law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the case remains open, said Ms. Broadwell had consented to the search.

The key word in that quote that strikes me is “consensual”. Broadwell has lawyered up too, having hired prominent Washington DC defense attorney Robert F. Muse. If an attorney feels his client is the target of a proposed search, he does not consent, he makes the officers get a warrant and search for only what a court orders and nothing else. You have to wonder what was being searched for that Broadwell and her counsel were not more worried about?

It is still early in the Allen portion of this mess, but it sure does cast the entire matter in a new light. Seriously, 30,000 pages of communications between Allen and Kelley in two years? That is 41 pages a day. When in the world did Allen find time to make war? And keep in mind, Kelley had already been stated to be regularly (up to once a day) emailing Petraeus for some of that period…she must be getting carpal tunnel syndrome.

There is also the pressing question of exactly what the methods and means were for discovering and extracting these 30,000 some odd pages of communications between General Allen and Jill Kelley, and how that came to pass when she was supposedly and innocent victim of Paula Broadwell. There were already great questions in this regard about Broadwell and Petraeus. I will leave that for later, I suspect Marcy may have something to say on those issues.

Four-star generals. Two of them wrapped up in one salacious scandal. The Stones may need to modify their lyrics ever so slightly.

These NYT, WaPo, and WSJ reports go a long way to clarifying some problems with the early chronology of the David Petraeus scandal

The NYT states the investigation started in June with Jill Kelley’s complaints to an FBI agent friend (note, earlier reporting had said the investigation started as early as February). WSJ says it began in May.

WaPo states that at some point FBI informed Kelley that Paula Broadwell was the one who had been sending the emails, though the story doesn’t say who at the FBI told her.

The FBI informed Kelley that Broadwell was the sender and Kelley said she did not know her, according to a person close to Kelley.

For the record, I’m betting Kelley is lying when she claims she didn’t know Broadwell.

WaPo further suggests that after being informed by the FBI, Kelley told Petraeus that Broadwell had sent the emails, and in response he asked Broadwell to stop. It also implies that’s why Petraeus ended the affair.

At some point this summer, Kelley told Petraeus about the e-mails and named Broadwell as the person who had sent them. Apparently in response, the CIA director sent e-mails to Broadwell telling her to stop the harassment, two law enforcement officials said.

Mansoor, who during his last tour in Iraq spent 15 months in a bedroom adjacent to Petreaus’s, said the affair ended four months ago. That roughly coincides with the time Petraeus discovered that Broadwell was sending the ­e-mails to Kelley, although Mansoor would not say who ended the relationship.

And NYT makes it clear all this happened before FBI interviewed Broadwell for the first time (there’s some dispute about when this first interview happened, September or October).

Before Ms. Broadwell spoke to the F.B.I. agents, Mr. Petraeus had learned that she had sent offensive e-mails to Ms. Kelley and asked her to stop, another official said.

Here’s what this would seem to suggest: the FBI, during an ongoing investigation that was continuing because they had found evidence of Petraeus’ involvement and potential national security exposure, told Kelley the preliminary results of their investigation: that Broadwell was the culprit.

And Petraeus almost immediately told Broadwell he knew about the email (it’s unclear whether he told her he knew about the investigation).

That story doesn’t make any sense!

By telling Kelley, the FBI tainted the investigation and may well have alerted the target of the investigation, Broadwell, to it.

Which is where this batshit crazy story from the WSJ seems to come in. It reveals that the FBI agent to whom Kelley first complained–the same guy who later told Eric Cantor about the investigation in late October–also sent Kelley a picture of himself shirtless.

However, supervisors soon became concerned that the initial agent might have grown obsessed with the matter, and prohibited him from any role in the investigation, according to the officials.

The FBI officials found that he had sent shirtless pictures of himself to Ms. Kelley, according to the people familiar with the probe.

That same agent, after being barred from the case, contacted a member of Congress, Washington Republican David Reichert, because he was concerned senior FBI officials were going to sweep the matter under the rug, the officials said. That information was relayed to top congressional officials, who notified FBI headquarters in Washington.

Now, WSJ doesn’t say it. But I bet you good money this guy told Kelley–whom he was apparently trying to seduce himself–the preliminary results of the investigation back in July, which led to Broadwell being tipped (perhaps) to the investigation. Along the way Petraeus and Broadwell had plenty of opportunities to get their stories straight, up to and including an October 27 black tie event just before FBI interviews Petraeus.

Which–if I’m right–would explain why the FBI took him off the investigation and is now conducting an investigation (though not in the proper investigative body, the Inspector General, but rather in DOJ’s cover-up specialty, Office of Professional Responsibility).

This investigation turned into a clusterfuck back in July, when the principles all started acting in response to the investigation.

Nevertheless, it continued for four more months (continues even this evening, as FBI searches Broadwell’s house).

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Holy hell I can’t believe I’m back in the business of writing about CIA reports on trips to Africa again, but here I am.

In this post, I noted that David Petraeus made a two-day trip to Cairo on October 31, just as the CIA launched its pushback campaign against Fox reporting, and just before Scott Shane wrote a maudlin story about Petraeus’ image.

October 25 [earliest reported date] – week of October 28: Petraeus interviewed by FBI.

October 26: Fox reports that CIA security in annex were twice told to stand down by “CIA chain of command.”

October 31: Acting after speaking to FBI “whistleblower,” Eric Cantor’s Chief of Staff calls Robert Mueller about investigation.

October 31- November 1: Petraeus in Cairo for security discussions.

November 2 [based on a briefing held November 1 while Petraeus was still in Cairo]: CIA releases timeline rebutting Fox report–mentioned by Broadwell–that CIA chain of command told security to stand down.

November 2: FBI interviews Broadwell a second time.

November 2: Scott Shane writes odd article on demise of Petraeus’ image, blaming his absence from media for Benghazi blowback, in part repeating a point made by Broadwell on October 26.

That appears to be the trip–and the report currently being withheld from the Intelligence Committees on the grounds it is not yet complete–referred to by Dianne Feinstein in this interview with Andrea Mitchell. (Daily Caller reported on this first.)

DiFi: I believe that Director Petraeus made a trip to the region shortly before this became public.

Mitchell: To Libya?

DiFi: Yes. I believe that there is a trip report. We have asked to see the trip report. One person tells me he has read it, and then we try to get it and they tell me it hasn’t been done. That’s unacceptable. We are entitled to this trip report and if we have to go to the floor of the Senate on a subpoena, we will do just that.

Mitchell: You’re suggesting that you might have to subpoena from the intelligence community a trip report that David Petraeus made after going to Libya within the last two weeks.

DiFi: Yes, for the very reason that it may have some very relevant information to what happened in Benghazi.

So right between the time the FBI interviewed Petraeus and the time Scott Shane was writing a valediction to Petraeus’ career, Petraeus went “to the region”–possibly to Libya itself. And CIA doesn’t want to tell Dianne Feinstein what Petraeus learned or did there.

I’ve got a half-done post backstage talking about the conflicting evidence regarding the February 17 Brigade’s behavior the night of the Benghazi attack. Suffice it to say that, while they had been reliable in the past, and while CIA and State timelines differ about what kind of help they provided the night of the attack, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest they had allowed the attack, if not participated themselves.

Thus, it seems another “friendly” force potentially trained by David Petraeus’ people turned on the Americans.

But as Josh Gerstein notes, in an update to his post on Paula Broadwell’s apparently classified comments on October 26, Fox actually tied the February 17 Brigade to the prisoners at the annex.

Later in her remarks, Broadwell, said some of her information had come from a Fox News report. Fox said Monday that it’s “original” Oct. 26 report did mention three Libyan militia members being turned over by the CIA to Libyan authorities. That detail does not appear in the version of the story now posted online, but Fox reporter Jennifer Griffin did include it in at least one report.

“We’re also told, those at the CIA annex took into custody three Libyan attackers and were forced to hand them over to the Libyan February 17th forces that came to help at the annex approximately 4:00 in the morning. They handed these three Libyans over. It is not clear from U.S. officials what happened to the libyans and whether those Libyan attackers were in fact released in in the end by the Libyans,” Griffin reported.

Now, this syntax seems to suggest the prisoners were not–as Fox is now reporting–more general detainees, but people tied to the attack taken prisoner. Here’s what Fox currently says.

In the original Oct. 26 Fox News report, sources at the annex said that the CIA’s Global Response Staff had handed over three Libyan militia members to the Libyan authorities who came to rescue the 30 Americans in the early hours of Sept. 12.

A well-placed Washington source confirms to Fox News that there were Libyan militiamen being held at the CIA annex in Benghazi and that their presence was being looked at as a possible motive for the staged attack on the consulate and annex that night.

According to multiple intelligence sources who have served in Benghazi, there were more than just Libyan militia members who were held and interrogated by CIA contractors at the CIA annex in the days prior to the attack. Other prisoners from additional countries in Africa and the Middle East were brought to this location.

The Libya annex was the largest CIA station in North Africa, and two weeks prior to the attack, the CIA was preparing to shut it down. Most prisoners, according to British and American intelligence sources, had been moved two weeks earlier.

As a threshold matter, I want to know why Fox took out that report if now–post-election–they’ve got multiple sources confirming what they took out of their earlier report.

But I also think this really confirms that part of the cover-up here is that the militia that was supposedly friendly–indeed, had been friendly and responsive going back some months–was undermining us in this case.

While the Beltway is slowly coming around to the logic that it’s not a good thing if the CIA Director has a pseudonymous Gmail account he uses to conduct an affair, it has yet to consider some other factors that may have forced David Petraeus to quit.

As a threshold matter, it appears that both Petraeus and Paula Broadwell did things that have gotten others–people like Thomas Drake–prosecuted and stripped of their security clearance. Obama can’t continue his war on leakers if he goes easy on Petraeus after compromising his own email account. In addition, it appears that as the FBI closed in on Petraeus, he and Broadwell may have pushed back by revealing (or claiming) CIA had prisoners in Benghazi. That is, in some way Petraeus and Broadwell’s response to the investigation appears to have colored how they treated the Benghazi pushback going on at precisely the same time.

Here’s a decent timeline of Petraeus’ demise (though many of these details–from the start date of the affair, the investigation, and Petraeus’ FBI interview have been reported using different dates, suggesting different anonymous stories may be offering different timelines). I’d like to concentrate on the following, which include a few additions.

[Week of, possibly day of] October 21 [alternately reported as September]: Paula Broadwell first interviewed by FBI. She agrees to turn over her computer, which will lead to the FBI finding classified information on it.

October 24 (written the day before): Petreaus applauds the guilty plea of John Kiriakou, who passed the identity of torturers to lawyers representing Gitmo detainees who have been tortured. Those lawyers have clearance, and they did not publicly reveal the most sensitive name. In his second-to-last statement as CIA Director, he writes,

This case yielded the first IIPA successful prosecution in 27 years, and it marks an important victory for our Agency, for our Intelligence Community, and for our country.  Oaths do matter, and there are indeed consequences for those who believe they are above the laws that protect our fellow officers and enable American intelligence agencies to operate with the requisite degree of secrecy.

October 24: Benghazi suspect killed in Cairo.

October 26: Fox reports that CIA security in annex were twice told to stand down by “CIA chain of command.”

October 26: At an appearance at DU, Paula Broadwell says,

Now, I don’t know if a lot of you heard this, but the CIA annex had actually, um, 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. So that’s still being vetted.

The challenging thing for General Petraeus is that in his new position, he’s not allowed to communicate with the press. So he’s known all of this — they had correspondence with the CIA station chief in, in Libya. Within 24 hours they kind of knew what was happening.

Update: See this post, which makes it clear Fox had the detail about prisoners but then took it out.

October 27: Petraeus and Broadwell hobnobbing at black tie event.

October 29: FBI interviews Petraeus.

October 31: Acting after speaking to FBI “whistleblower,” Eric Cantor’s Chief of Staff calls Robert Mueller about investigation.

October 31- November 1: Petraeus in Cairo for security discussions.

November 2 [based on a briefing held November 1 while Petraeus was still in Cairo]: CIA releases timeline rebutting Fox report–mentioned by Broadwell–that CIA chain of command told security to stand down.

November 2: FBI interviews Broadwell a second time.

November 2: Scott Shane writes odd article on demise of Petraeus’ image, blaming his absence from media for Benghazi blowback, in part repeating a point made by Broadwell on October 26. It includes the following:

But since an attack killed four Americans seven weeks ago in Benghazi, Libya, his deliberately low profile, and the C.I.A.’s penchant for secrecy, have left a void that has been filled by a news media and Congressional furor over whether it could have been prevented. Rather than acknowledge the C.I.A.’s presence in Benghazi, Mr. Petraeus and other agency officials fought a losing battle to keep it secret, even as the events there became a point of contention in the presidential campaign.

[snip]

But the Benghazi crisis has posed an extraordinary test for Mr. Petraeus. After the killings, intelligence officials concerned about exposing the extent and methods of the large C.I.A. presence in the city would say little to reporters for publication.

[snip]

On Thursday, hoping to subdue the gathering public relations storm, intelligence officials invited reporters to a background briefing to, in their view, set the record straight. They offered a timeline of C.I.A. actions on the night of the attack, countering the idea that the besieged Americans were left alone under fire, and explaining why some would-be rescue efforts discussed in news reports were never feasible.

Notably, they also sought to rehabilitate Mr. Petraeus from some of the negative speculation that has surrounded him. The C.I.A. director, said one intelligence official, “has been fully engaged from the start of the agency’s response, particularly in the rescue mission that was swift and aggressive.”

The article also included a paragraph that sounded like a bid to spin issues that have gone haywire in good light.

Mr. Petraeus has managed the delicate task of supporting rebels in Syria’s civil war while trying to prevent the arming of anti-American extremists. But when his C-17 Globemaster touched down in Turkey in September for consultations on Syria, the trip went all but unnoticed by the news media. He worked for months to address the complaints of Pakistani officials about drone strikes against militants, while keeping State Department officials abreast of likely future strikes, a policy called “pre-concurrence” that has prevented interagency squabbles. In his travels to the tumultuous post-Arab Spring Middle East this week, only a brief mention of his arrival in Cairo surfaced in local news reports.

November 5: Based on second interview with Broadwell, FBI “tentatively” rules out charges.

November 5: Broadwell publishes General David Petraeus Rules for Living, including these.

4. There is an exception to every rule, standard operating procedure, and poli­cy; it is up to leaders to determine when exceptions should be made and to ex­plain why they made them.

5. We all will make mistakes. The key is to recognize them and admit them, to learn from them, and to take off the rear­ view mirrors—drive on and avoid making them again.

6. Be humble. The people you’ll be lead­ing already have on-the-ground conflict experience. “Listen and learn.”

7. Be a team player. “Your team’s triumphs and failures will, obviously, be yours.” Take ownership of both.

November 6: Having reportedly determined the facts of the case, FBI informs James Clapper of the investigation. Clapper talks to Petraeus, urges him to resign. (Note that public integrity investigations allow for the resignation of a public figure in lieu of charges.)

November 7: Clapper again urges Petraeus to resign. Clapper informs Obama.

November 8: Petraeus meets with Obama, reportedly asks to be allowed to resign.

November 9: Obama accepts Petraeus’ resignation.

Update: This post has been updated to reflect dates reported in this story.