You have to hand it to those Fox Newsies for partisan gumption. They didn’t let any lack of actual evidence of Obama administration wrongdoing in the Gen. David Petraeus sex scandal stop them from theorizing and suggesting that there was. For extra GOP points, Steve Doocy dragged in Eric Holder, one of Fox’s favorite Obama-administration scapegoats, and said that his theoretical involvement in the theoretical cover up “could be” why Eric Holder is staying on as Attorney General for President Obama’s second term.
As Karoli pointed out earlier, there’s a lot of Republican partisanship afoot in the Petraeus scandal:
David Petraeus is in disgrace because he had a midlife crisis or something and got hot and heavy with a woman prone to jealous, impulsive acts (sending harassing emails to her suspected rival, Jill Kelley). Meanwhile, some FBI agent with the hots for Jill Kelley and a "worldview" that included weird and unprovable conspiracy theories about political coverups to protect President Obama got impatient and contacted his teaBircher Congressional buddies.
The Curvy Couch Crew ignored those facts this morning in order to raise questions about the Obama administration. Gretchen Carlson said, “Something’s not being told about that whole side of the story.” Meaning why the FBI was investigating. And yet she left out the part about how that FBI agent with the hots for Kelley and an antagonism toward President Obama went to Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor with his suspicions and how Cantor called the FBI director on October 31 to push the story relay his concerns in the final week of a hotly-contested presidential election.
“How do we know there wasn’t a national security breach? They’re still going through (Petraeus’ paramour’s) files?” Laura Ingraham squawked accusingly. Of course, there’s nothing to suggest at this point that there was one. But she moved on to smear Holder:
Eric Holder, we’re supposed to believe, didn’t talk to one of his closest friends. One of his closest friends is Barack Obama. He’s been at the center of voter ID cases, immigration cases against Arizona, Fast and Furious, the refusal to prosecute the New Black Panther Party. I mean, Eric Holder is a fulcrum of a lot of what’s going on over the last four years. He’s very close to the president. And I do not believe, after all the years I’ve been here, that Eric Holder would have kept information from the president about a CIA director being a part of a federal investigation. And if he did, I think that’s incompetence or malfeasance.
If you believe the FBI – and I tend to believe them more than the heated hypotheses of Fox News partisans – there was nothing to tell the president. From ABC News:
The FBI withheld its findings about Gen. David Petreaus' affair from the White House and congressional leaders because the agency considered them the result of a criminal investigation that never reached the threshold of an intelligence probe, law enforcement sources said today.
The sources said agents followed department guidelines that generally bar sharing information about developing criminal investigations. The FBI is also aware of its history under former director J. Edgar Hoover of playing politics and digging into the lives of public figures. As one official said, the rules are designed to protect people (both private and elected officials) when negative information about them arises in the course of a criminal investigation that is not a crime.
…Investigators uncovered no compromising of classified information or criminal activity, sources familiar with the probe said, adding that all that was found was a lot of "human drama."
In other words, this looks a lot like a tempest in a Tea Party pot. On October 31, the day that Rep. Cantor called the FBI, President Obama had his hands full with Super Storm Sandy and the end of his presidential campaign. I don’t know about you but I wouldn't bother my boss with “human drama” details, either, if he were in the middle of a cataclysmic natural disaster and at the tail end of a national re-election campaign.
But Doocy, it seems, could not pass up an opportunity – no matter how wildly speculative – to take a smearing swipe at Holder and Obama. “Laura, that could be one of the reasons why Barack Obama’s asking him to stay on for another second term.”
Not one of the other three Fox Newsies on the set objected to such baseless conjecture.
