As more details emerge about the FBI’s role in exposing the sex scandal that led to the resignation of CIA director David Petraeus, more than a few observers are finding the FBI’s broad power to snoop through private and highly intimate e‑mails more disturbing than any of the sexual misconduct those e‑mails revealed. Yet despite a seemingly endless stream of FBI leaks about the investigation, a surprising number of crucial questions about this stunningly broad and intrusive inquiry remain unanswered.
For those who’ve managed to avoid the media feeding frenzy, The Atlantic has a handy timeline of what we know about the investigation so far. It appears to have begun with a complaint by Florida socialite Jill Kelley about some “harassing” e‑mails she received from an anonymous source criticizing what the sender perceived as an inappropriate relationship between Kelley and some of the generals she’d befriended at a local military base. Though the e‑mails contained no specific threats, and have been characterized by at least one source as more catty than menacing, Kelley reported them to a friend in the FBI. According to FBI sources, superiors became worried that the agent was “obsessed” with the case, ultimately barring him from the investigation.
Despite the relative thinness of the case—the FBI as a rule does not devote serious resources to tracking down senders of nonthreatening, catty e‑mails, and only 10 cases have been prosecuted under federal cyberharassment law over the past two years—the Bureau opened a cyberstalking investigation, supposedly at least in part because they were concerned by references to the “comings and goings” of generals, and to events not on published schedules. Using subpoenas for the access logs of the anonymous e‑mailer’s account, they linked it to activity on other accounts, as well as the hotels from which they had been accessed, ultimately exposing the author as Petraeus biographer Paula Broadwell. Armed with this information, the FBI obtained legal process to compel the disclosure of the contents of her accounts, uncovering an illicit affair between Broadwell and Petraeus.
That’s what we know. But there’s a lot that we don’t—a lot of pieces that just don’t fit. Here are some of the bigger unanswered questions: