Timeline Shows F.B.I. Discovered Petraeus Affair in Summer Amy Scherzer/Tampa Bay Times, via Associated Press From left, Natalie Khawam, David H. Petraeus, Scott Kelley, Jill Kelley and Holly Petraeus at an event in Tampa in 2010. Ms. Kelley's complaint about harassing e-mails prompted the initial inquiry that led to Mr. Petraeus's resignation as director of the C.I.A. 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. On Monday, Representative Peter T. King of New York, who is a member of the Homeland Security Committee but is not on the Intelligence Committee, said he felt that officials of the F.B.I. "had an absolute obligation to tell the president" that an investigation involved the head of the C.I.A. And he said Mr. Petraeus ought to appear at intelligence hearings, "if not this week, then the weeks after." But in an appearance on the "Morning Joe" show on MSNBC, Mr. King, a Republican, also said of the initial inquiry into the matter, "I don't know how this rises to the level of an F.B.I. investigation." The bureau's history would make the privacy question especially significant; in his decades 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. Law enforcement officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the investigation, defended the F.B.I.'s handling of the case. Steve Boylan a retired colonel who was General Petraeus's spokesman in Iraq and talked to him this weekend, confirmed on Monday that the intimate relationship between Mr. Petraeus and his biographer, Paula Broadwell, began after he retired from the military last year and about two months after he started as C.I.A. director. It ended about four months ago, he said. Colonel Boylan said that in their conversations Mr. Petraeus regretted "how much pain this has caused his family," and said of Mrs. Petraeus: "furious would be an understatement." He spoke on ABC's "Good Morning America." A close friend of the Petraeus family said Mr. Petraeus had received numerous phone calls of support over the weekend, including from former President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Feinstein. At the C.I.A., it can be a security issue, because it can make an intelligence officer vulnerable to blackmail, but it is not a crime.