King on Petraeus scandal: This is a “crisis of major proportions”

On MSNBC this morning, Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee and member of the Intelligence Committee, discussed the sketchy timeline of the events leading up to David Petraeus’ resignation as head of the CIA and the questions that Congress is still looking to get answered.

Joe Scarborough for one is skeptical about the proffered narrative, to say the least.

KING: I don’t know how this rises to the level of an FBI investigation. … Once the FBI realized that it was investigating the director of the CIA or the CIA director had come within its focus or its scope, I believe at that time they had an absolute obligation to tell the president. Not to protect David Petraeus, but to protect the president. … The fact is he is a key part of the president’s foreign policy team, maybe more than any other CIA director in recent times. … And to have someone out there in such a sensitive position who the FBI thought perhaps could have been compromised or was under the scope of an FBI investigation who may or may not have been having an affair at the time, that to me had to have been brought to the president or certainly to the National Security Council. If not, the FBI was derelict in its duty.

SCARBOROUGH: Peter, it is mind-blowing to think that the director of the FBI knew about this from the summer, has almost daily contacts with the president of the United States, knows that the man who’s entrusted to, in effect, run the War on Terror, may be compromised? And he doesn’t say anything to the president of the United States for months? Somebody needs to be fired here. This is ridiculous.

KING: This is a crisis, I believe, of major proportions. … I’m not into conspiracy theories, but I certainly have questions. For instance, my first concern is with the FBI: Why they went ahead with the investigation and why they didn’t tell somebody above. If they did tell somebody above, it would have been Eric Holder. And in that case, Holder should have gone to the president.

As Ed already pointed out this morning, the timing of this latest debacle just gets curioser and curioser. Not only will Congress be investigating the FBI’s investigation of the former CIA director, but they’re not ruling out calling Petraeus to testify during the upcoming Benghazi hearings regardless of his resignation.

Operation Fast & Furious was reason enough to be up in arms over the way the president seems to be running his administration, but then came Benghazi and now this? It’s hard not to wonder what the heck is going on over there. I think I’m with Joe Scarborough on this one: “The FBI, the attorney general, everybody better get their story straight fast, because this doesn’t add up.”

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