Free Republic

TAMPA — The emails were anguished, pleading and sent straight to the mayor. "Bob, hope all is well," Jill Kelley wrote at 5:57 a.m. Tuesday to Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, whom she knows socially. What came next offers a glimpse into Kelley's state of mind as a national scandal blew up in her front yard. "My kids are scared, and need their 'home' back," she wrote, asking for help with "paparazzi" at her Bayshore Boulevard mansion. At 6:18 a.m. Wednesday, she emailed again. "Dear Mayor Bob," she wrote, saying that her name, along with those of former CIA director David...

TAMPA — Her business card is utterly ordinary. No big titles. No hint of connections with the military and political elite. It lists her address, her phone number and her name in elegant script: "Honorable Jill G. Kelley." But the outsized portrait of herself that Kelley presents to the world will fit on no card. It's seen in her emails to Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn and others. She drops names. She mentions lunch at the White House in a casual aside, one of three visits she has made there in the last six weeks. The top U.S. general in Afghanistan...