The period between Thanksgiving and Christmas/New Years eve is when Americans wind down for the year. President Obama was expected to spend the period in quiet reflection over recasting his cabinet for the second term and negotiating away from the fiscal cliff, a perilous political and economic hazard that will result in big spending cuts and tax increases for Americans next year if current laws are not extended.
Instead, amid meetings relating to these issues - including engaging Indian-American business leaders and policy wonks such as Indra Nooyi and Neera Tanden (see box) - President Obama is having to deal with a tawdry drama involving his two top generals and two women as it unfolds hour-by-hour before a Washington elite that is not unused to such escapades, though usually in politics.
On Monday, Obama, a parent of two young daughters himself, was told that Gen John Allen, his top commander in Afghanistan, is being investigated for e-mail exchanges with Jill Kelley, a State Department liaison to Gen. Petraeus. It was Kelley's complaint to the FBI about anonymous emails that led to the uncovering of his (Petraeus') affair with his biographer Paula Broadwell, resulting in his resignation as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency last week. The nature of the Allen-Kelley exchanges have not been disclosed.
Broadwell, 40, and Kelley, 37, are both married to successful physicians in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Tampa, Florida, respectively. They have two and three young children respectively. Petraeus, 60, has two adult children from his marriage of 37 years.
While Broadwell saw Kelley as a rival for Gen.Petraeus' affections, the two only shared a platonic relationship, according to various media reports based on driblets of information from surrogates and secondary sources. None of the principals are talking directly to the press; instead, they are all lawyering up, hiring top attorneys for what promises to be enervating political theater in the days ahead with Congress, the Justice Department/FBI, and the media getting their teeth into a still unfolding story.
As if the expansion of the perceived love triangle to include a fourth player in Gen.Allen was not complicated enough, there are also questions being asked about the role of an FBI agent in the original episode. Some reports suggest that the emails Broadwell sent to Kelley were not threatening or harassing, but variously gratuitous, hostile, and insulting.
But Kelley brought it to the notice of an FBI agent who was her friend, who not only took undue interest in the messages, but also alerted a Congressman to the episode after he was relieved from the case. The unnamed agent is also being investigated internally for sending shirtless photos of himself to Kelley, according to some reports, lending an even more bizarre air to the developments.
On Monday night, FBI agents searched Paula Broadwell's North Carolina home, carrying away what presumably were boxes of evidence. She, like Gen.Petraeus, remained incommunicado, while Kelley hired Abbe Lowell, a top Washington attorney who represented Bill Clinton and John Edwards during their escapades, leading some analysts to surmise that bigger surprises are ahead.
''This is about something else entirely, and the truth will come out. There is a lot more that is going to come out,'' Broadwell's father Paul Krantz was quoted as telling a New York tabloid. ''You wait and see. There's a lot more here than meets the eye.''
Meanwhile, Congress geared up for hearings on a series of interlinked issues -- the Benghazi episode, the Petraeus-Broadwell affair, and now the John Allen angle. At the heart of the inquiry: the timelines, who knew what and when, and whether there was any leak of classified information and national security breaches.
Lawmakers are suspicious that important developments in the intelligence and security sphere were withheld from them because of the ongoing elections and the Obama administration maneuvered to disclose them only after the President secured a second term. Unnamed administration officials have rejected the idea, saying there were a lot of grey areas on whether the FBI should even proceed with the investigation of an affair between two consenting adults after it was determined that no security breach had occurred.
From the moral/ethical angle, Gen.Petraeus could have been tried for adultery if his affair with Broadwell began when he was still in the military. But surrogates who claim to have spoken to him have told the media the relationship began last year after he retired from the army and took over as Director of CIA. They say he also ended it early this year after being shocked by FBI inquiries about his lover Broadwell's emails to a perceived rival (Jill Kelley) who was just a close family friend.
Some reports also claim that he was hoping to ride over the disclosures after coming clean with the FBI but he was eventually outed by rivals in the military-intelligence establishment. Moreover, the scandal had leaked to Congress and would have put the Obama administration in a bad spot even as it began a second term in January.
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