Allen is innocent of any wrongdoing, says a source who claims Gen. Allen also received "one of these weird, threatening letters" disparaging Jill Kelley, and passed it along to her.
The David Petraeus scandal just keeps getting weirder. Today's batch of stories are all about how the FBI probe that led to his resignation "also turned up evidence that Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, was exchanging potentially inappropriate emails with a Florida woman involved in the scandal," as the Los Angeles Times puts it, sourcing the story to Pentagon officials.
The New York Times describes it this way:
In a statement released to reporters on his plane en route to Australia early Tuesday, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said that the F.B.I. on Sunday had referred "a matter involving" General Allen to the Pentagon.
Mr. Panetta turned the matter over to the Pentagon's inspector general to conduct an investigation into what a defense official said were 20,000 to 30,000 pages of documents, many of them e-mails between General Allen and Ms. Kelley, who is married and has children.
The phrase "inappropriate emails" in the LA Times story and the description of Kelley as "married and has children" in the NY Times story make it sound as though a romantic relationship was involved, whereas the 20,000 to 30,000 pages of documents allegedly exchanged make it sound like perhaps the problem involved the sharing of classified documents, though neither allegation has been firmly made. The weasel word in the stories -- "potentially inappropriate emails" -- is strange, isn't it?