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.
She could be the daughter of a viscount.
I’ve heard it said that these sisters are of Lebanese extraction. People tend to forget that until fairly recently Lebanon was dominated politically by Christians, not Muslims. I’ve heard that the family is Lebanese-Christian, but I haven’t seen that confirmed yet. It would make it unlikely that they are working for Iran, but the intelligence game includes people (spies) who don’t even realize who they are ultimately working for. So anything is possible.
I agree with Debbie.
I just call them “The Tilted Head Twins”.....they ALWAYS have their heads atilt in evey picture!!
or a red light woman
...that is the divorce/custody angle we hear about the generals writing about in support of Jill Kelly's sister.
I tend to as well.
She has some interesting stuff on her site, I think I'll spend a little time there today.
Well that's convenient isn't it?
Look at his Father. Paul G Grayson
Seaport-E
“WASHINGTON (TheBlaze/AP) — Two U.S. officials say just a handful of the emails between the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan and a Florida woman are potentially problematic, but the vast majority of the 20,000-plus pages of documents reviewed by investigators were routine.”
But what is this guy doing sending 20k pages of document to Jill Kelley in the first place.
Didn’t the Muslim Brotherhood or CAIR get a tour of the CIA or NSA too?
Something like that?
oops , I meant Paul G Wolfe.
I'm leaning towards your theory too.
And of course the Duke of Earl
Whatever the outcome, at least that girl in her golden years will be able to look back on her life and have more than a visit to Walmart as the highlight of her life!
I probably have missed this somewhere, but is she actually and American Citizen (Naturalized) or is she Permanent Visa/Socialite Visa?
I probably have missed this somewhere, but is she actually an American Citizen (Naturalized) or is she Permanent Visa/Socialite Visa?
the curse of the double-post has hit me again.
I doubt we will see those logs.
Obama admin lawyers fight to obstruct public access to White House logs
Peterson said government lawyers maintained in oral argument that the White House would be forced to released sensitive information if they made the logs available, a point that ignores the fact that any records with the potential to compromise national security can be redacted under FOIA.
Now, he said, Judicial Watch and other plaintiffs await a ruling in the case, which may come near the end of the year.
Obama Admin. Still Avoiding Release of White House Visitor Logs
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/09/24/Obama-White-House-Visitor-Logs
Nearly three years after Judicial Watch first filed a lawsuit trying to obtain Obama White House visitor logs, we are still in court battling for their release. Last week, our attorney Jim Peterson went before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to make our case.
Glenn Beck put out an excellent video two or three days ago that says it is much more nefarious than that. He posits that this is part of the radical leftist efforts to discredit the last remaining intact institutions in the West that command our respect -- our military and intelligence agencies. Communists have worked for decades to infiltrate and destroy all of our sacred institutions -- it was their "long march" and it has been very successful. But the military and intelligence world was able to resist.
But, when you look at the look at the long train of abuse these institutions have endured in the last decade, you have to wonder if this is part of a grand effort to complete the undermining of the west. Beck suggests that Petraeus was selected to head the CIA by Obama precisely because they had the goods on his before him nomination.
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