Bizarre, Criminal law, International, Media, Military, Politics, Torts

Jill Kelley Claims “Honorary” Diplomatic Status In Latest Twist In Petraeus Scandal

Last night, while discussing the Petraeus scandal on CNN, the network played a 911 call from one of the four major figures in the scandal: Jill Kelley. The call is perfectly bizarre in which Kelley, a Florida socialite, claims “honorary diplomatic” status to get the police to stop people from walking across her lawn. The dispatcher listens patiently and appears to resist the temptation to tell her that he will be sending over some honorary police to protect their honorary diplomatic residence.

Kelley is the woman who went to a friend in the FBI to complain about threatening emails from an anonymous source — emails that led the FBI to Paula Broadwell and ultimately Gen. David Petraeus. She and the agent are a rather odd couple. He sent her shirtless pictures of himself and was eventually removed from involvement in the case. She is described as a “nice, bored, rich socialite” who volunteered with the military as a self-described “social liaison” and cultivated relationships with generals. This included a questionable relationship with Gen. John Allen, commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, involving a remarkable number of emails described by some sources as a bit raunchy and “like phone sex.”

Just when you thought the scandal could not get more weird, it did. Last night, we heard this 911 call for “diplomatic protection:”

“Thank you and you know, um, I don’t know, but by any chance because I’m an honorary council general, so I have inviolability so I should… they should not be able to (cross) this property, I don’t know if you want to get diplomatic protection involved as well.

Kelley has been described as invoking her diplomatic status previously. She was given the unpaid title of “honorary ambassador” to CENTCOM, the Department of Defense Central Command. This gives her about the same diplomatic status as the hostess at an International House of Pancakes.

What is strange is that she is protected by the non-honorary title of a citizen of Tampa from trespass. She is allowed to demand the removal of people from her property so long as it is not a public space or a private space with a form of constructive easement.

She might want to stick with the Tampa title because “Honorary ambassador” does not fit neatly into the the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (1961). However, if she wishes to claim to be an honorary diplomat, it would allow Tampa to declare her persona non grata but it is not clear what country she would be expelled to since she is claiming diplomatic immunity in her own country. It might be just easier to get a “No Trespass” sign at Home Depot.

284 thoughts on “Jill Kelley Claims “Honorary” Diplomatic Status In Latest Twist In Petraeus Scandal”

  2. And now Broadwell is being thoroughly discredited … I wonder if she has something to say that certain folks don’t want anyone to believe.

  3. SwM,

    So now Humphries wants us to believe he was just gossiping to Cantor …

    Who cares. He stepped into a huge pile of horse manure that he not only failed to see but whose smell he misidentified.

    That’s the smell we’re following.

  4. Paula Broadwell’s drive and resilience hit obstacles
    By Greg Jaffe and Anne Gearan, Nov 15, 2012 08:37 PM EST
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/paula-broadwells-drive-and-resilience-hit-obstacles/2012/11/15/bf5989a2-2e94-11e2-89d4-040c9330702a_story.html

    Excerpt:
    Paula Broadwell was a rising star who seemed destined for a sparkling career in foreign policy. A West Point graduate who excelled in triathlons, she was pursuing a doctorate at Harvard University and had found a mentor in Gen. David H. Petraeus, an iconic U.S. military leader.

    But in 2007, Broadwell was asked to leave the doctoral program at Harvard, where she had first met Petraeus a year earlier, because her course work didn’t meet its demanding standards, according to people familiar with what happened there.

    What Broadwell did next was a signature feature of her resilience and drive — and what detractors say is her tendency to overstate her credentials.

    Broadwell, 40, eventually leveraged her unfinished dissertation into a best-selling biography of Petraeus, a project that gave her almost unlimited access to the general when he commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan and later when he was director of the CIA. That access also led to the extramarital affair that upended Petraeus’s career and shined a bright light on Broadwell’s.

    A few months after leaving Harvard, Broadwell launched a full-bore effort to remake herself as a highly visible player in Washington’s insular foreign policy community. At the time, she and her husband, a radiologist, were raising toddlers and preparing to move to Charlotte, where he was setting up his practice.

    In the summer of 2009, Broadwell told several prominent experts on counterinsurgency warfare that she had been asked by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the newly installed Afghan war commander, to assemble a team of first-tier academics and experts who would conduct an outside evaluation of McChrystal’s highly anticipated review of his war strategy.

    She pressed experts in Washington and Cambridge, Mass., to join her review panel and lobbied senior U.S. military officials in Kabul to back her fledgling “red team” effort, military jargon for an outsider evaluation. The prospective team held a couple of meetings, according to one person who was involved.

    But senior military officials who were on McChrystal’s staff said Broadwell was not asked to spearhead an evaluation. The officials, who like others requested anonymity to speak freely about Broadwell and Petraeus, said her attempt to assemble a “red team” review panel was rejected after McChrystal’s aides decided that her experience, her connections and her academic credentials were too thin.

    “She was trying to pull together something way over her head,” said Mark R. Jacobson, a former deputy NATO senior civilian representative in Afghanistan, who was approached by Broadwell to serve on the team. Jacobson said he admired Broadwell’s pluck. “It was the kind of move you make in Washington when you are trying to make a name,” he said.

    Others who had been approached to serve in the group said they questioned her assurances that she had the backing of top military officials. In a 2010 interview on a Web site focused on leadership, Broadwell was still saying that McChrystal had asked her to assemble the leadership team.

  5. From: David Petraeus Scandal: Top Officials Testify On Capitol Hill

    “WASHINGTON — Top national security officials trudged to Capitol Hill on Thursday to grapple with fallout from the David Petraeus sex scandal as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta asked service chiefs to review ethics training for military officers. He said he was unaware of any other top brass who could turn out to be ensnared in the debacle.

    One person missing from the tableau: Afghan war chief Gen. John Allen, whose nomination to take over in Europe is on hold because of suggestive emails turned up in the investigation.

    Legislators went forward with a hearing on the nomination of Gen. Joseph Dunford to replace Allen in Afghanistan. But with Allen’s own future uncertain, they put off consideration of his promotion to U.S. European Command chief and NATO supreme allied commander. Allen had initially been scheduled to testify.

    Panetta, speaking at a news conference in Bangkok, gave new words of support to Allen, voicing “tremendous confidence” in the general.

    Citing a string of ethical lapses by senior military officers, however, Panetta asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to review ethics training and look for ways to help officers stay out of trouble.

    Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., opened Dunford’s hearing with kind words for Allen, saying, “I continue to believe that General Allen is one of our best military leaders. And I continue to have confidence in his ability to lead the war in Afghanistan.”
    ********************
    What McCain fails to realize is that it doesn’t matter what he thinks of Allen. This whole episode effectively cripples him with our NATO allies. They won’t trust him and they have good reason not to trust him with their national security data. He may go on to that role, but if he does, it’s purely political from our side and a bad move diplomatically and from a functional standpoint. Personally, I think he’s done.

  6. No apologies needed, gbk. Some of the best humor on this blog comes from typos. Just ask raff. 😀

  7. I’m thinking a little of both but more of the later, Blouise.

    One of the ways to spot a liar, after all, is the rehearsed liar is always a bit too quick in response. The timing of everything relating to outing Petraeus smells of panic. If they’d waited a couple of months after the election? Maybe not, but the close timing reeks of anxious and the fear they wouldn’t be able to sit on Humphries that long. Some dogs won’t let go of a bone that tastes good even if you hit them with a rolled up newspaper. The players not wanting to be exposed stepped a little too quick in this instance. My nose knows.

  8. et al.

    Humphries as a rouge element ( 😉 ) is, in my opinion, right on the money.

    I don’t think Humphries motives were idealistic as they were more the motives of an ideologue which is what I found so slimy about Purdum’s piece. He used Dunk, a real hero, as a jumping off point to do somebody’s dirty work in trashing Humphries. This is the kind of thing Dunk would have railed against.

    Anyway … it’s not Purdum I’m interested in but rather who suggested Purdum do it. Was it just that age old and tiresome story of “gotcha” game playing between the FBI and the CIA or are we really looking at another attempt to run the “WMD” scam that Humphries inadvertently blew up and the plotters are so damn exposed they’re panicking and using every trick in the book looking for cover?

  9. Gene,

    “While the “rouge element” typo was funny, gbk, I’m pretty sure the parties involved are not Communists.”

    Ha, one can never proof enough, can they? Sorry about that.

  11. “Cantor’s staff members have said the Virginia lawmaker talked to Humphries on Oct. 27 and then contacted a prominent lawyer in his state, former U.S. attorney Richard Cullen for advice. Delayed by the government shutdown associated with Hurricane Sandy, his chief of staff contacted Mueller’s chief of staff on Oct. 31.

    At the time, the case was moving forward. Petraeus had been interviewed by FBI agents on Oct. 29. Mueller’s office assured Cantor’s staff that the case was being fully investigated.

    One week later, the Justice Department disclosed the existence of the investigation to James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, who informed the White House. Petraeus resigned three days later.

    Among the questions being asked by congressional leaders is why the White House and Clapper, who was Petraeus’s supervisor in the intelligence community, were not notified earlier. Some have suggested that Cantor’s contact with the FBI led to the disclosure.

    “I don’t know if it would have taken this course without Cantor,” a person close to the inquiry said.” Washington Post

  12. While the “rouge element” typo was funny, gbk, I’m pretty sure the parties involved are not Communists. 😉

    It’s good to see our analyses (including Blouise and AP) are running down the same paths though. If four sets of eyes are seeing the same or parts of the same pattern, then there is most likely something substantive there.

  15. Blouise,

    “. . . a smidgen of truth employed to disguise an intentional discrediting of the Humphries because he forced the issue in a manner that totally blew any chance of a cover-up out of the water.”

    I agree. I think Humphries was a wild card that was not expected and is now being used as an after-the-fact smokescreen. As ABC News noted:

    “An associate of Humphries told ABC News that it was hard to believe that Humphries had contacted elected officials about the case because ‘everyone knows that’s professional suicide’ and Humphries is ‘top notch.'”

    http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/veteran-fbi-agent-frederick-humphries-ball-rolling-petraeus/story?id=17722771

    Additionally, why did Cantor sit on the information for a spell? I can’t imagine him not using this information against Obama before the election; unless, of course, Humphries opened a door meant to remain closed .

    Something held Cantor back, because if the purpose of Broadwell/Kelly, et. al. were to be honeypots used to expose potential incompetence from Obama via the proxy of Petraeus’ infidelity the mission was accomplished when Humphries spoke with Cantor.

    The NY Times reported that:

    “Government officials said that the F.B.I. began an investigation into a “potential criminal matter” several months ago that was not focused on Mr. Petraeus. In the course of their inquiry into whether a computer used by Mr. Petraeus had been compromised, agents discovered evidence of the relationship as well as other security concerns.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/10/us/citing-affair-petraeus-resigns-as-cia-director.html?hp

    It’s certainly possible that the investigation referred to above was the emails Kelly received, but if it was the FBI would have known rather quickly that Petraeus was involved. The quote might be Orwellian doublespeak, or it might be a grain of truth.

    The timing of the Benghazi embassy attack is eerily reminiscent of the failure of Jimmy Carter’s “Eagle Claw” operation to militarily extract the US embassy hostages in Iran. (A good link for this will be in a second post.)

    It’s possible that the Benghazi embassy attack was an attempt by rouge elements in our government to discredit the current administration’s foreign policy and influence the election, and that Humphries is a unexpected fly in the ointment.

  16. ap,

    There’s a couple things about this article that I find a bit ingenuous.

    I remember Durk and would agree with everything the author, Purdum, has to say about him. I would even agree that there is no real comparison between Durk’s motives and actions and Humphries’.

    But Purdum’s characterization of Humphries seems a bit too convenient. Humphries claims that the shirtless picture was sent years ago as part of a batch of family pictures that the Kelleys and Humphries were exchanging and that he was posing shirtless between two cardboard figures. The picture was snapped as part of the family outing, not for Kelley. No one has come forward to counter that claim so the term “chesty” chosen by Purdum seems calculated to continue a characterization of Humphries that serves an interest other than the truth.

    Humphries also claims that he was not kicked off the investigation because, other than referring the complaint to the FBI, he was never a part of the investigation. No one has come forward to counter that statement either so, once again, Purdum’s characterization of Humphries seems to be serving an interest other than the truth.

    Remember Judith Miller? Purdum’s article reminds me of the kind of crap Miller used to write.

    I don’t think Humphries went to the Republican leadership for the right reasons, nor do I think Humphries has acted with any of the courage or commitment of Durk but … Purdum’s article smacks of CIA payback … a smidgen of truth employed to disguise an intentional discrediting of the Humphries because he forced the issue in a manner that totally blew any chance of a cover-up out of the water.

    And I’m not just talking a cover up of Patraeus’ adultery. There’s a lot more going on here and that lots more was inadvertently exposed, and all the plotters made vulnerable … something I don’t think Humphries knew about or intended.

  17. The Real Thing

    Looking for a moment of edification as the Petraeus scandal unfolds?

    Think back four decades to a forgotten whistle-blower who acted for all the right reasons—and got results.

    By Todd S. Purdum

    http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/purdum/2012/11/david-durk-petraeus-scandal

    “Anyone depressed by the latest headlines about the shirtless F.B.I. “whistle-blower” whose antsy and ill-advised leak to Congressional Republicans apparently led to the public exposure of General David Petraeus’s affair might turn for solace to the obituary pages—and the sobering, salutary story of a real-life whistle-blower, David Durk, who died this week at 77.

    Durk’s name may no longer be familiar, but without him, a quirky New York City cop named Frank Serpico would never have become a legend, Al Pacino’s early film career would have been less interesting, and the massive, systemic corruption of the 1960s-era N.Y.P.D. would have gone unexposed and unaddressed. For it was Durk, a brainy, idealistic Amherst graduate who became a patrolman in the era of the New Frontier, whose persistence (and press and political contacts) led to the New York Times series that broke the scandal wide open in 1970.

    How far we have fallen, when a sworn officer of the F.B.I., the supposed best of the nation’s law-enforcement elite, would not only send a beefcake photo of himself to a flaky Florida socialite but then pass on her complaint of receiving harassing e-mails to the bureau’s cyber-crimes team.

    I came to know Durk in my own police-reporting days 25 years ago, when I covered some comparatively minor corruption scandals and sought his perspective. He could be dark and difficult, all too aware from personal experience of the imperfectability of man. When I’d call him and ask how he was, his invariable response was, “Breathing in and out.” But it was impossible not to admire him, and his and Serpico’s lonely fight to break the “Blue Wall of Silence” that forced even honest cops to tolerate the corruption, payoffs, protection rackets, and thievery that were all around them.

    Their crusade fueled the Times’s stories, public hearings by a blue-ribbon commission, and widespread, institutionalized reforms that, while not perfect, changed the N.Y.P.D.’s culture forever. (The scandal also exploded whatever presidential ambitions Mayor John V. Lindsay might have dared to entertain.)

    As my old friend Bob McFadden’s obituary of Durk in the Times makes clear, Sidney Lumet’s 1973 film about the scandal criminally minimized Durk’s real-life role (a minor Durk-like character is played smarmily by Tony Roberts) while lionizing Serpico’s, in much the same way that the film of All the President’s Men canonized Ben Bradlee while slighting his fellow Washington Post editor Howard Simons, whose early support for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s investigation of Watergate was crucial to the story.

    I don’t recall ever asking Durk directly about this, but it was clear that he had simply done the right thing for the right reasons, and getting credit was never the point. “Corruption is not about money at all,” he told the Knapp Commission that investigated the scandal, “because there is no amount of money that you can pay a cop to risk his life 365 days a year. Being a cop is a vocation or it is nothing at all, and that’s what I saw destroyed by the corruption of the New York City Police Department, destroyed for me and for thousands of others like me.”

    How far we have fallen, when a sworn officer of the F.B.I., the supposed best of the nation’s law-enforcement elite, would not only send a beefcake photo of himself to a flaky Florida socialite but then pass on her complaint of receiving harassing e-mails to the bureau’s cyber-crimes team and—when it developed that the e-mails had come from the mistress of the C.I.A. director—so meddle in the case that his superiors had to slap him down. Out of pique, Agent Chesty (whom the Times has since identified as the “obsessive” Frederick W. Humphries II) then apparently complained to a Republican Congressman, Dave Reichert of Washington state, who helped pass the word to House Minority Leader Eric Cantor, who alerted top F.B.I. brass.

    It now seems pretty clear that it was this development—the knowledge that one of the Obama administration’s staunchest political adversaries was aware of a tawdry and embarrassing (but apparently non-criminal and non-security-threatening) affair being conducted by the nation’s top spymaster—that led the F.B.I. to inform the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, who told the White House and urged Petraeus to resign. What good has come from any of this, and what good can? That’s very hard to say at the moment.

    If you asked me how I feel living in Washington these days, I’d have to say—like David Durk, may he rest in peace—that I’m just “breathing in and out.” (end of article)

  18. I Hope Vernon Loeb Isn’t Also Ghostwriting Paula Broadwell’s Ph.D. Dissertation
    By David Kroll
    http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidkroll/2012/11/14/i-hope-vernon-loeb-isnt-also-ghostwriting-paula-broadwells-ph-d-dissertation/

    Excerpt:
    I’ve hesitated writing anything about the Petraeus clusterfluster since I didn’t think I had anything to contribute.

    But as a university professor who has trained Ph.D. students, I’ve been chewing on something ever since Vernon Loeb wrote in The Washington Post about his service to Paula Broadwell as ghostwriter of the Petraeus biography, All In. The book is credited as “Paula Broadwell [large font] with Vernon Loeb [small font].”

    Broadwell, as many people now know, is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Her student page remains active at the College website at the time of this writing.

    What’s concerning to me is the description of her doctoral research:

    “Paula is conducting a study in military innovation. Her work challenges existing theories which emphasize top-down transformations by examining the roles of bottom-up catalytsts [sic] and mid-level military mavericks in galvanizing institutional innovation, particularly in unconventional warfare and counterinsurgency operations. In addition to exploring the history of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine, her research examines the role of one individual who often receives credit for the U.S. defense innovation in the “new counterinsurgency era,” General David Petraeus. By exploring Petraeus’s “intellectual biography,” her research illustrates the origins of his beliefs in population-centric counterinsurgency warfare and American grand strategy

    Now, while I haven’t read her book with Loeb, the second half of what should be Broadwell’s independent Ph.D. work sounds mighty close to her publisher’s summary of All In.

    What would concern me — and it’s certainly not going to be missed by her examining committee at King’s College — is whether she plans to include in her dissertation any text that has been written by Loeb. My thought is that even before this scandal broke, Broadwell was going to have to defend the use of Loeb as ghostwriter of her book in the context of her Ph.D. work.

  19. “She was not someone you would think of as a critical thinker. I don’t remember anything about her as a student. I remember her as a personality.”

    The professor said when Petraeus chose Broadwell to write his biography, there was shock among the national security faculty at Harvard because “she just didn’t have the background — the academic background, the national security background, or the writing background.” (from Elaine’s post at 10:16am)

    Patraeus – arrogance + libido = temporary insanity … resulting in loss of reputation

  20. Don’t you just marvel at all the “unnamed” sources the media quotes.

    Re Allen’s email fling with Kelley:

    “If they got out, John Allen would be very embarrassed by them,” said a U.S. official familiar with the e-mails but who added that there was no evidence of physical contact between the two.”

    “But a senior official close to Allen told CNN that the e-mails contained nothing pointing to sex or anything of a romantic nature.”

    “… flirtatious in nature …”

    http://www.cnn.com/2012/11/15/us/petraeus-allen-investigation/index.html

Comments are closed.