The emails which Paula Broadwell sent to supposed love rival Jill Kelley and which led to her affair with David Petraeus being exposed were “kind of cat-fight stuff”, it was claimed last night.

Paula Broadwell was apparently aggressive towards Jill Kelley, saying: “Who do you think you are?”

She also accused socialite Jill Kelley, a Petraeus family friend, of “parad[ing] around the base”, adding: “You need to take it down a notch.”

The revelation comes as a team of FBI agents has descended on paula Broadwell’s home and started removing boxes of household items.

It is unclear what investigators are doing at the house in Charlotte, North Carolina, and they have refused to comment on their latest probe into the writer.

Further questions about the FBI’s role in the scandal, which saw David Petraeus resign from the CIA last Friday, have been raised by the revelation of the notorious emails’ contents by the Daily Beast.

A source told the website the emails did not contain threats or references to the former general, but were instead vague expressions of hostility, taking aim at Jill Kelley’s role as a “social liaison” at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida.

When Jill Kelley first reported the messages to a friend who works for the FBI, she did not regard them as a criminal matter, instead simply saying: “I don’t know who this person is and I don’t want to keep getting them.”

The emails which Paula Broadwell sent to supposed love rival Jill Kelley were kind of cat-fight stuff

And when investigators looked at the messages, many were unimpressed, according to the Beast‘s source – many simply concluded, “There’s no threat there.”

However, Jill Kelley’s friendship with an FBI agent apparently meant the bureau took the emails more seriously than they otherwise might have – and helped them uncover the months-long relationship between Paula Broadwell and David Petraeus.

They launched a wide-ranging investigation, interviewing both the CIA director and his former lover, but eventually concluding that no crime or national security breach had been committed.

David Petraeus offered his resignation on Thursday afternoon, and officially stepped down the next day.

It became clear within hours that Paula Broadwell, who met the general in Iraq when she was researching a dissertation which would eventually become a full-length biography, was the woman with whom he had cheated on Holly, his wife of 37 years.

And on Monday evening it appeared that the FBI had reopened their investigation, as at least six agents visited her home – where she is not currently staying – and removed several boxes.