The Other Petraeus Scandal: The Sex Police

Ah, the FBI. Ask them to prove any case involving a triviality like torture or financial fraud, you’re out of luck. But if someone might be involved in the sexytime in their email — especially if it might sort of vaguely affect a Democratic administration — they’ll be right on it:

According to a senior U.S. defense official, the FBI has uncovered between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of documents — most of them e-mails — that contain “potentially inappropriate” communication between Allen and Jill Kelley, the 37-year-old Tampa woman whose report of harassment by a person who turned out to be Petraeus’s mistress ultimately led to Petraeus’s downfall.

1)If by “inappropriate” — oh, wait, sorry, potentially inappropriate, now there’s a standard for a fishing expedition through someone’s email I’m comfortable with —  nothing more is meant than “emails with the sexytime in them” this investigation is a massive scandal, and 2)I’m pretty confident that if anything more was meant by it, we would be hearing about it now.   Kelley and the generals are all adults and weren’t involved in any kind of supervisory relationship, so anything “inappropriate” about their communications would really not seem to be any of the FBI’s business.

And the same problem exists with the initial investigation. Apparently, there was nothing in Broadwell’s initial emails that comes remotely close to illegal threats or harassment. As far as I can tell, there’s absolutely nothing here that justifies an ongoing investigation that involves combing through people’s email with the inevitable leaks to the press. Whether or not it was the result of partisan motivations, it’s outrageous that this investigation didn’t die after Broadwell’s emails to Kelley revealed no illegal threats.   And if “potentially” “inappropriate” behavior justifies extensive looks into people’s private communications, we might as well just pass a constitutional amendment doing away with that obsolete Fourth one.

…more here.