General reaches agreement with justice department over charge he gave sensitive information to Paula Broadwell while he was director of the CIA

This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

General David Petraeus, the pre-eminent wartime military officer of his generation, will plead guilty in a deal reached with the justice department to one count of passing classified information to a lover while he was director of the CIA.

The department announced the plea deal in a statement on Tuesday. The deal calls for two years’ probation and a $40,000 fine, with no prison time.



The FBI recommended that felony charges be brought against Petraeus in January, following an investigation of his relationship with Paula Broadwell, a member of the army reserve and Petraeus’s biographer.



The plea agreement was filed in the US district court for the western district of North Carolina’s Charlotte division. Broadwell and her family live in Charlotte.



Petraeus resigned as head of the CIA in late 2012 after his affair with Broadwell came to light. “I have no evidence at this point from what I’ve seen that classified information was disclosed that in any way would have had a negative impact on our national security,” Obama said at a White House briefing following the resignation.

Federal prosecutors disagreed, advising the attorney general, Eric Holder, to bring charges against Petraeus for giving information to Broadwell, possibly for use in her book All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.

The guilty plea marks a stunning new low for Petraeus, a four-star general once entrusted with the country’s defining military missions and most closely held secrets. Petraeus took charge of multinational forces in Iraq in 2007, after four years of filling various command roles in the country, including combat roles. He was placed in charge of United States Central Command in 2008, and became commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan two years later.

The plea deal establishes that Petraeus shared “black books” with Broadwell with “classified information regarding the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions, quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council meetings, and defendant David Howell Petraeus’s discussions with the President of the United States of America”.

The plea deal filing further establishes that Petraeus lied to FBI agents on 26 October 2012 in his office at CIA headquarters. “Petraeus stated that … he had never provided any classified information to his biographer” or facilitated its provision, the filing reads. “These statements were false. Defendant David Howell Petraeus then and there knew that he previously shared the Black Books with his biographer.”

Petraeus did not respond to requests for comment from the Guardian.

In the two and a half years since he resigned as head of the CIA, Petraeus has held teaching roles, including at Harvard and the City University of New York, and joined the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts as a partner.

Petraeus apologized for his infidelity in a statement as he left government, saying that “after being married for over 37 years I showed extremely poor judgment”.

“Such behavior is unacceptable, both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours,” Petraeus said. “This afternoon, the president graciously accepted my resignation.