Either someone at the FBI should be fired or we're not getting the whole story from the White House about when the president was informed of the extramarital affair of former CIA Director David Petreaus.

This explanation by the FBI is prerty lame:

High-level officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department were notified in the late summer that F.B.I. agents had uncovered what appeared to be an extramarital affair involving the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, David H. Petraeus, government officials said Sunday.

But law enforcement officials did not notify anyone outside the F.B.I. or the Justice Department until last week because the investigation was incomplete and initial concerns about possible security breaches, which would demand more immediate action, did not appear to be justified, the officials said.

The new accounts of the events that led to Mr. Petraeus's sudden resignation on Friday shed light on the competing pressures facing F.B.I. agents who recognized the high stakes of any investigation involving the C.I.A. director but who were wary of exposing a private affair with no criminal or security implications. For the first time Sunday, the woman whose report of harassing e-mails led to the exposure of the affair was identified as Jill Kelley, 37, of Tampa, Fla.

Some members of Congress have protested the delay in being notified of the F.B.I.'s investigation of Mr. Petraeus until just after the presidential election. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, said Sunday that her committee would "absolutely" demand an explanation. An F.B.I. case involving the C.I.A. director "could have had an effect on national security," she said on "Fox News Sunday." "I think we should have been told."

But the bureau's history would make the privacy question especially significant; in his decades-long reign as the F.B.I.'s first director, J. Edgar Hoover sometimes directed agents to spy improperly on the sex lives of public figures and then used the resulting information to pressure or blackmail them.

What does Hoover have to do with this? Nothing, but the New York Times felt it necessary to throw sand in our eyes by gratuitously pointing out that Hoover spied on people like Martin Luther King and tried to use the information on his sex life to pressure him.

This is not Hoover spying on civilians. This is the FBI investigating potential criminal activity with national security implications. How that remotely relates to "privacy" is a straw man thrown up by the Times to deflect attention from the question of why Congress wasn't informed, and more importantly, why the president was suipposedly kept in the dark?

The story is that the FBI informed the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper - Petreaus's boss - of the affair at 5:00 PM on election night. Clapper contacted Petreaus "as a friend, colleague, and fellow general officer, and urged him to resign.

That was Tuesday. Why was the president kept in the dark by Clapper, the FBI, and the Department of Justice until Thursday when the White House says the president was finally informed?

Something about this story doesn't add up.