David Petraeus and Paula Broadwell reportedly emailed each other about having "sex under a desk." The emails between the scandal's two other players, John Allen and Jill Kelley, were quite a bit more innocent, a senior official tells the AP. The source says officials who read the emails found nothing sexually explicit or seductive in them, though they did include pet names like "sweetheart" and "dear." NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman sweetly reminds us that "that ... might be innocent. He's from Virginia and that might be something of a quaint way he addressed her." He's not the only one saying the Allen-Kelley scandal could be less scandalous than it seems:
- At a news conference in Australia today, Leon Panetta warned that "no one should leap to any conclusions." He expressed full confidence in Allen's ability to continue to lead in Afghanistan, and added that putting a hold on Allen's European Command nomination was the "prudent" thing to do.
- And NPR reports that while the "20,000 to 30,000 pages of communications" figure has been bandied about, it's still unclear how many emails the two actually swapped. It speculates that the true number could be "in the low hundreds," as "documents and duplicate printouts may have boosted the number of pages into the tens of thousands."
- Still, the official told the AP that while much of the communication is relatively innocuous, some could be construed as unprofessional and would cause a reasonable person to take notice.
The press around Jill Kelley this morning hasn't been as kind; click for more on the alleged bogus charity
she ran. (More
Jill Kelley stories.)
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uBlock 
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and
Ghostery 
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