Posted on 11/17/2012 6:57:23 AM PST by RummyChick
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 is calling from overseas to ask for her help. She spends the weekend with the CIA director whose resignation she would inadvertently help set in motion. And always the party invitations.
Retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former chief of U.S. Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base, said the tawdry sex scandal that Kelley helped trigger is as hard to understand as it is odd. How, he asks, did Kelley – a flamboyant South Tampa socialite – skirt the vetting normally insulating the nation's top generals?
"This is strange," Zinni said Friday. "To me, it's just so bizarre."
Zinni said he respects both ex-CIA director David Petraeus and Gen. John R. Allen, the four-star Marine leader whom the Pentagon is investigating for potentially inappropriate emails he sent to Kelley.
Allen served as deputy and acting commander at CentCom from 2008 to 2011. Petraeus, before becoming top U.S. commander in Afghanistan and then CIA director, headed CentCom before Allen.
Petraeus' affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell, was uncovered after Kelley received what she perceived to be threatening emails that she reported to the FBI. Agents traced the emails to Broadwell.
In his day every social invitation and meeting with a civilian was examined by his staff to make sure it would not reflect poorly on the military, said Zinni, a Virginia resident who is now an outside director of the aerospace company BAE Systems.
Zinni said his staff judge advocate — an office providing legal support to a military commander — helped him navigate these sometimes perilous shoals.
Speaking of Kelley's socializing with MacDill brass, Zinni said, "That's something my staff judge advocate would have been on in a heartbeat."
Kelley was anything but subtle about her connections.
"I'm up in DC having dinner tonight with Gen Petraeus & Gen John Allen," Kelley says in one 2012 email to Buckhorn.
After radio shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge threatened to "deep fat fry" the Koran earlier this year, Kelley told Buckhorn that Allen and Petraeus were seeking her help to get word to Bubba that doing so would endanger lives.
"Gen Allen will be calling me from Afghanistan at 1pm on this — and our next step," Kelley told Buckhorn in a March 7 email.
In recent days, Kelley complained about the constant presence of reporters and photographers outside her house as the scandal broke. She told Buckhorn she was upset that "your police department" released 911 calls she made to Tampa police.
But the 911 tapes were a public record.
"This is a situation of her own making," Buckhorn said Friday. "We're all just bystanders."
• • •
Her timing was spectacular.
On Nov. 4, two days before the presidential election and five days before Petraeus visited President Barack Obama at the White House to offer his resignation, Kelley, her twin sister Natalie Khawam, their children and Dr. Scott Kelley went on a tour of the White House.
On Oct. 24, the sisters had lunch in the White House Mess with a White House staffer. That followed a Sept. 28 breakfast between the same three people.
The White House declined to name the staffer, saying his identity would become public in a few months when visitor logs are posted. But an official said the staffer had gotten to know Jill Kelley through connections to MacDill.
The man worked as a civilian lawyer in Afghanistan and got to know military personnel, who invited him to MacDill, where he met Kelley. He now works as a lawyer in the White House.
• • •
Zinni didn't have much spare time when he commanded CentCom more than a decade ago. He actually tallied it up when he left the combatant command.
"I was gone more than 70 percent of the time," Zinni said. "And of course I didn't have the same crisis situations CentCom's been dealing with for the last 12 years."
So when Zinni heard news reports that Allen exchanged hundreds, perhaps even thousands of emails with Kelley, he was amazed.
"I don't know where the time came to do all of that," said Zinni, noting that he thinks Allen is one of the military's finest commanders. "It's a full-time job."
He said his biggest concern is that the sex scandal will harm the military's reputation. "It chips away at respect," Zinni said.
Zinni said civilians who love the military often try to get too close and, even though they may have good intentions, they can cause difficulties.
"Sometimes it's hard for them to understand that what they're doing might be inappropriate," he said.
Acknowledging that some of the more aggressive civilians sometimes act like groupies at a Rolling Stones concert, Zinni said with a laugh, "It never happened to me."
• • •
Kelley didn't limit her interaction with military personnel to her lavish Bayshore Boulevard home. In October 2010, Kelley jumped out of an airplane with a bunch of commandos.
It was a tandem skydive with a U.S. Special Operations Command's Para Commando parachute team. It's a thrill sometimes offered to select civilians. Miss Florida did it once. No word on where the jump took place. But SOCom, like CentCom, is headquartered at MacDill.
Kelley landed safely.
So Jill is a Judge now???
It has now been confirmed that Kelley had her White House Breakfast at the invitation of a White House Staffer and it was at the WHITE HOUSE MESS - contrary to that ridiculous poster here who told me that couldn't be right.
“As far as degrees of separation go, it is safe to assume that David Petraeus, the disgraced former director of the CIA never in his life thought he would be connected with shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge.
However, just like many other four-star generals and national intelligence chiefs, Bubba had dealings with Tampa socialite and some-time honorary consul for South Korea, Jill Kelley.
Adding a tawdry new level to the Petraeus scandal, it has emerged that 37-year-old Kelley and Bubba crossed paths when she involved herself in a spat over the radio host’s claims that he was going to deep fat fry a Koran earlier this year.
“
A Country Unhinged
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson111512B.html
How can some individual just call up an FBI friend (?) and thereby instigate an FBI investigation? And how did that lead to an FBI agent photographing himself bare-chested and apparently infatuated with a married mother of three? How can a PhD candidate, without any journalistic or historical credentials, become the public face of a four-star general and be privy to information to the point of hitting the lecture circuit to pontificate about a CIA annex in Benghazi? How did an early-middle-aged married mother of two suddenly morph into a court biographer who lectured on everything from military practice to leadership to national-security challenges? How can a Florida socialite by any stretch of the imagination merit a vast email correspondence with the nation’s highest ranking warriors entrusted to conduct our most critical struggles? What in the world is an “honorary consul general” and who extends such Alice Through the Looking Glass titles? Why do generals seek to go back stage to meet a Denzel Washington or have Angelina Jolie pop up for a photo-op?
Are people like her the real movers and shakers that make things happen? Lord help us all.
Some one correct me if I am wrong....
Jill Kelley and her sister were born in Lebanon.
The military command at CentCom completely dropped the ball vetting these women. Jill Kelley’s activities sound EXACTLY like a sleeper agent’s action in ingratiaing herself into a position of influence.
Touring the White House, huh? This is starting to look like the Obama Administration ‘sprung a trap’ on Gen. Petreaus in order to (a) get rid of him, and (b) discredit him in the process. Don’t get me wrong... Petreaus did a good job of getting fired but the issues surrounding Benghazi are far larger than his personal problems (minor) and the security leaks (more serious). He deserved to get fired. He shouldn’t be muzzled.
Jill Kelley and her sister look like the Kardashians, who also are famous for nothing.
These people serve a purpose of distraction while behind the curtain our society is being destroyed on purpose, socialism has invaded every part of our lives, and we will wake up in 2013 to 2nd term of a marxist/communist/socialist president.
They might be “eye candy” but they are really poison...
Every time I read anything about Jill Kelley, I am left with the impression her lifestyle is commensurate to a call girl’s.
I can't believe nobody else has pointed that out.
I think she is just a Whore
IMHO - If Jill Kelly was homely and flat chested she wouldn't be living in a waterfront mansion, dining at the White House and watching grown men make asses of themselves.
Check this out from Debbie Schlussel:
bubba has up his video of the song he blasted outside of Kelleys’ home
It’s graphic
http://www.btls.com/
She is going to pay a price for claiming that Generals ask her to get involved in the Koran burning incident. he will not let this go
Eye candy is a real stretch but to each his own I guess.
I’m not convinced they are just groupies.
They won’t tell us who the staffer is at the White House who they dined with twice.
And a tour of the White House on Nov.4th is another red flag. The visits all within the past couple of months.
I think there is more going on here than just the superficial stuff.
It’s interesting that they won’t tell us the name of the staffer until the White House logs come out.
“The man worked as a civilian lawyer in Afghanistan and got to know military personnel, who invited him to MacDill, where he met Kelley. He now works as a lawyer in the White House.”
So a lawyer at the WH ,...hmm....
You haven’t read enough threads. It’s been on almost every thread that I have posted about Jill Kelley.
AP story about Petraeus scandal mistakenly refers to “Florida socialist” Jill Kelley
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