The death of journalist Michael Hastings is raising new questions after an email he sent hours before last week’s fatal car crash has surfaced showing a possible FBI probe into the reporter.
KTLA News in Los Angeles received an email on Friday that was
forwarded to them by a friend of the 33-year-old reporter.
Hastings, who wrote for Rolling Stone and the website BuzzFeed,
perished after an auto wreck in L.A. early Tuesday last week.
According to an email Hastings sent Monday afternoon to a handful
of friends, he believed his colleagues could be visited by
Federal Bureau of Investigation officers due to an article he was
working on.
“Hey [redacted}, the Feds are interviewing my ‘close friends
and associates,’” Hastings wrote, before recommending to his
colleagues that they seek legal advice if approached by
investigators.
“Also: I’m onto a big story, and need to go off the rada[r]
for a bit,” he added. “All the best, and hope to see you
all soon.”
Hastings was reportedly working on an article about Florida
socialite Jill Kelley at the time of his death. Kelley made
headlines last year after she became entangled in a high-profile
scandal involving then-CIA Director David Petraeus and Gen.
George Allen, who then commanded US troops in Afghanistan. A
federal probe of suspicious emails sent to Kelley later unearthed
an extramarital between Gen. Petraeus and his biographer, Paula
Broadwell, which led to the CIA director’s resignation.
Before taking the helm as CIA director, Petraeus commanded US
troops in Afghanistan – the same role that later went to Gen.
Allen. Petraeus had inherited that role from Gen. Stanley
McChrystal. On his part, McChystal resigned from that position
after a 2010 Hastings-penned article from Afghanistan raised
questions about the commander’s remarks about the Obama
administration. He was forced to apologize for comments he made
in the article that led to his resignation, and Hastings was
presented with a Polk journalism award for his report.
Staff Sgt. Joseph Biggs, who met Hastings when the journalist was
embedded in Afghanistan in 2008, said he received the email less
than a day before the auto accident and told KTLA it sounded
“very panicked.”
“It alarmed me very much,” Biggs said. “I just said it
doesn’t seem like him. I don’t know, I just had this gut feeling
and it just really bothered me,” he said.
“He was a good friend of mine,” Biggs wrote in a tweet
sent after Hastings’ death.
According to the soldier, Biggs was blind-copied on the email
sent mid-day Monday, which was addressed to a handful of
Hastings’ colleagues. He died around 15 hours after the email was
sent.
One week after his death, speculations continue to surround
Hastings’ death. The other recipients of the email obtained by
Higgs have yet to address the correspondence, but the soldier
said it’s unlikely because others are worried of what will happen
next.
“The reason I released the email is because those people were
too scared. I’m not,” Higgs tweeted over the weekend.
“I won’t let a man die in vein [sic] because I’m too scared of
what will happen to me. If I sent that email to Mike he wouldn’t
rest,” Higgs wrote, “He would fight.”
On the eve of Hastings’ funeral this Monday in Vermont, Higgs
said the deceased journalist’s wife thanked him for releasing the
email.
“She’s vowing to take down whoever did this. She’s a
fighter,” he wrote.
The Los Angeles Police Department says they do not suspect foul
play in Hastings’ death, and the FBI said he was not the target
of an investigation.
Appearing on Fox News on Monday, Ali Gharib, a journalist and
friend of Hastings, said “I don’t think he was a reckless a
person.”
“That doesn’t mean he might not have been driving excessively
fast,” added Gharib, who said it wouldn’t be “a wild
situation” to imagine Hastings driving quickly through Los
Angeles late last week.
Speaking to Yahoo News last week, eyewitness Michael Carter wrote
that he was nearby at the time of impact and “saw a giant
fireball at the base of one of the palms that line the
medians” on the road Hastings’ Mercedes was traveling down.
“It was surreal. Even from as far away as I was, I could see
how violent an impact it had been.”
This article originally appeared on: RT