The former director of the CIA and Commander of U.S. CENTCOM, Gen. David Petraeus, who's under consideration to become the next Secretary of State, told ABC's This Week that he didn't know he was lying to the FBI when he lied to the FBI.
And if you believe that, Gov. Chris Christie has a bridge to sell you.
You would think that the disgraced former head of the CIA would know what a lie is when being interviewed by the FBI since telling any lie to them is a highly punishable offense.
One that he skated on by pleading out his case.
Stephanopoulos asked, "You'll be pressed on whether you made false statements to the FBI. Director Comey said you did. And you acknowledged that in your plea agreement, yet your attorney told The Washington Post this week that you simply forgot about the journal. So are you challenging the director's conclusion there?"
Petraeus responded by saying, "Well, no, look, I mean obviously I made a false statement. At the time I didn't think it was false, and frankly I think if they might have pursued that more."
Is he trying his hand at stand up comedy?
The government weighed charging him with lying to the FBI and to be violating a section of the Espionage Act. A conviction on either carried potentially years in prison.
Would anyone possibly believe that a man of his rank and position would not know that he was handing over heavily classified documents to his biographer/mistress when he did?
(I'm not including Trump surrogates in this argument since they will tell you facts don't matter anymore.)
He continued, "I'd also like to add, by the way, something that he left out which is that the FBI in the agreement acknowledged that nothing that was in my journals that I shared certainly improperly ended up in the biography or made it out to the public. I think that's a fairly significant point, in fact."
No, it's not.
It doesn't matter if she used the material in her book or not. Paula Broadwell was not cleared to read those secrets. Period. Full stop. The end. She was also a loose cannon, who initiated the whole investigation against Gen. Petraeus by sending threatening emails to a Florida woman namedJill Kelley.
Agents also learned that Broadwell was in possession of classified documents, triggering an investigation of how she obtained them. The FBI searched Petraeus’s house in April 2013 and found the books in an unlocked drawer in his study. The books contained top-secret information that the Justice Department said could cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security if disclosed.
The secrets he exposed were of the "exceptionally grave" variety of secrets. Do we know - for sure - exactly - what Broadwell did with them?
(Here's some back story on Kelley)
When the FBI asked him about it, Petraeus lied and said he didn't hand over classified materials to Paula Broadwell. If he didn't know they were classified then he should never have been a general, let alone the Director of the CIA.
Many Americans are facing lengthy jail sentences for all kinds of offenses including possessing drugs, but Gen. Petraeus got basically a slap on the wrist for betraying the US government and lying to the FBI to cover his tracks.
Not only don't facts matter anymore in the post-Trump era, but as Stephanopoulos stated, "It appears that your security clearance problems are not disqualifying to President-elect Trump right now..."
Indeed.
