RUSH: Our old buddy Bob Woodward today in the Style section of the Washington Post. The Now, this story is fascinating, and also fascinating to me is who might have leaked this and how long it’s been known. Bob Woodward is reporting that Roger Ailes advised David Petraeus to run for president way back in 2011. Had Petraeus run, Woodward says that Ailes would have resigned as head of Fox News to run the campaign. Woodward also claims that Rupert Murdoch might have helped fund the Petraeus campaign.
Now, the story is that Ailes looked at the Republican field and wasn’t impressed. Ailes is a big military guy and loves Petraeus, and he’s got an analyst on his staff named Kathleen McFarland, KT McFarland who was from the Bush administration and she’s in national security, foreign policy, State Department, CIA, that kind of stuff. Apparently, according to Woodward, Ailes dispatched KT McFarland to Petraeus to pose the idea of Petraeus running for president. This was 2011. Now, keep in mind we don’t know exactly when Petraeus began his affair with Paula Broadwell. We don’t know when that started. But it was probably in 2011 or before, since by that time Broadwell had already been working closely with Petraeus for several years on her book on him, and by then she was using nicknames for Petraeus like Dangerous Dave and Peaches. Those were the two nicknames that she had for Petraeus.
The interesting thing is the regime had to know about this. The Obama regime had to know about the Petraeus affair with Broadwell. The regime had to know that the affair was going on. I wonder if the regime knew about this. I wonder if the regime knew, because the deal was apparently Ailes said to KT McFarland, “You go up there and you tell him if he’s offered CIA, to deny it, to not take it and demand chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” And Petraeus accepted CIA. None of this, of course, ever happened, and they asked Ailes about it (imitating Ailes), “Oh, you know, I’m a wise guy. I like to have fun with things.” He didn’t deny it. But he said that it was not nearly as big a deal as is being made here by the Post and Bob Woodward.
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