The Shirtless FBI Agent's Shirtless Photo Was a Joke (and Not a Sexy Joke)

The Seattle Times has identified the FBI agent who set off the Petraeus sex scandal by contacting Congress after Jill Kelley told him she was receiving threatening emails. As we all know, the mysterious man in question also sent a scaaaandalous shirtless photo to Kelley, a longtime friend. Except, as it turns out, the photo was part of a “dumb joke” email that he sent to a bunch of other people, including his boss at the FBI and his wife. REALLY, FBI? You couldn’t figure that one out?

The FBI agent is Fred Humphries, a Special Agent who has a history of rebelling against the Bureau — he once agreed to testify on behalf of convicted would-be “millennium bomber” Ahmed Ressam. He’s also apparently quite the jokester: once, after a SWAT practice, he posed shirtless with some target dummies and sent the email to a bunch of people, including his supervisor, who posted the photo on the FBI bulletin board so they could all LOL about it, his wife, a Seattle Times reporter (which is why they got the scoop), and — of course — Kelley. According to the Seattle Times:

Humphries, 47, confirmed the photograph exists and was sent to Kelley and dozens of other friends and acquaintances in the fall of 2010, shortly after Humphries had transferred to the Tampa office from Guantánamo Bay, where he had been an FBI liaison to the CIA at the detention facility there.

Indeed, among his friends and associates, Humphries was known to send dumb-joke emails in which the punch line was provided by opening an attached photo.

A Seattle Times reporter was among those who received an email containing an attachment of the shirtless photo. The subject line read: “Which one is Fred?”

Which one is Fred? He’s the guy who enjoy emailing semi-funny photos to his friends and, also, making the FBI look pretty dumb. They may be Female Body Inspectors (according to those T-shirts they sell on the boardwalk), but they’re not so adept at knowing what constitutes a sext.