He said that he had sent it from an account shared with his wife and that his
wife even had a framed copy of it, undermining allegations that he had
become romantically infatuated with Mrs Kelley.
Mr Humphries, 47, was named on Thursday as the man in the FBI bureau in Tampa,
Florida, who acted on a complaint by Jill Kelley, a local socialite, about
anonymous emails warning her to stay away from Mr Petraeus.
Inquiries prompted by Mr Humphries, a friend of Mrs Kelley, allegedly found
that the emails had been sent by Paula Broadwell, Mr Petraeus’s biographer.
Further investigation disclosed that Ms Broadwell and the CIA director were
having an affair — and that Mrs Kelley and Gen John Allen, head of US
central command, had exchanged multiple affectionate emails.
Lawyers for Mr Humphries, who helped foil 1999’s “millennium plot”, rejected
reports that he had been removed from the inquiry after it was discovered he
had sent a shirtless photograph to Mrs Kelley.
Humphries at a crime scene in Tampa, Florida, in 2007. Picture:
REUTERS/Thomas M. Goethe/Tampa Bay Times/Files
“That picture was sent years before Mrs Kelley contacted him about this,”
Lawrence Berger, the general counsel for the Federal Law Enforcement
Officers Association, told The New York Times.
“It was sent as part of a larger context of what I would call social relations
in which the families would exchange numerous photos of each other,” Mr
Berger added, describing the picture as “a joke” depicting Mr Humphries
posing with dummies.
Allies also stressed that Mr Humphries had not even been a member of the
investigation team. However the agent — who in 2010 shot dead a
knife-wielding man at Tampa’s MacDill airbase — did play a key role in
forcing details of the inquiry into public.
Describing him as a dogged pursuer of wrongdoing, colleagues said that Mr
Humphries feared the inquiry was being stalled or covered up to avoid
embarrassing its high-profile subjects. He disclosed its details last month
to a Republican congressman for Washington state, where he was previously
posted for the FBI.
The congressman passed it on to Eric Cantor, the party’s House majority
leader. Rather than go public with an explosive allegation on the eve of the
presidential election, Mr Cantor — a fiercely ambitious partisan — notified
Robert Mueller, the FBI director, who initiated action among senior
officials.
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