Trump & Co’s Polygraph Pandemonium

This column first appeared on Spytalk.co. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Military.com.

Decades ago, a wise and long serving Justice Department inspector general remarked to me that leak investigations were “a fool’s errand.” By that he meant that they rarely ended in criminal investigations and often led back to the offices of political appointees who had expressed the loudest outrage, where they were quietly buried. They also, of course, exacted a cost in department morale, as leak sleuths roamed the corridors and called employees to basement interrogation cells like so many wired-up Inspector Javerts.

That’s what the Trump machine has unleashed upon Washington, according to a generally overlooked story reported by The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima and Hannah Natanson on Monday. The hypocrisy of the Signalgate crew here is palpable.

Of course, FBI Director Kash Patel, whose campaign to root out the “deep state” animated his campaign for a top national security job in the Trump regime, has embraced the so-called “lie detector” initiative, which seems prompted by the embarrassing revelations of—wait for it—leaky security behavior by top national security officials.

“The seriousness of the specific leaks in question precipitated the polygraphs, as they involved potential damage to security protocols at the bureau,” said an unidentified spokesperson, apparently blithely insensitive to the probe’s rationale.

Putting aside the absurdity of the campaign, though, I wonder if Patel & co. are aware of long standing questions about how effective polygraphs are.

Multiple studies over the years have shown not only that polygraphs are hardly foolproof when it comes to vetting  applicants to federal jobs, they leave a false sense of security that an agency has protected itself from criminals and enemy moles. 

As the late great New York Times investigative reporter David Burnham wrote way back in January 1986, “One of the nagging questions about the polygraph concerns its basic usefulness.”

Burnham went on: “Although there is evidence the tests can help investigators in narrowly focused criminal cases, a 1983 study by the Office of Technology Assessment, a bipartisan agency that serves Congress, concluded, ‘The available research does not establish the scientific validity of the polygraph test for personnel security screening.’'' 

Nearly a decade later, I took up the issue in the New York Times, following reports that the infamous Russian mole in the CIA, Aldrich Ames, had passed numerous polygraph tests with flying colors.  Sen. Dennis DeConcini, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I wrote, had visited Ames in jail and asked how he passed the exams. "Well," Ames replied, "they don't work."

"Polygraphs are little more accurate than flipping a coin," says Dr. David Lykken, a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota and expert on polygraphs, also told me.  Drew C. Richardson, an F.B.I. supervisor with a Ph.D. in physiology, had also cast doubt on their efficacy, telling a conference of polygraphy experts that he had successfully taught his 10-year-old son the techniques to beat the critical Control Question Test, in which a physiological base rate is established on a subject’s responses to questions designed to make him or her lie. A knowing subject can bite their tongue or squeeze their toes to manipulate the test.

"It's a fine instrument for interrogation if you already have strong evidence of someone's guilt," John J. Furedy, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, told me. But as a trap to catch moles randomly? It’s "astrology," "magic," "wishful thinking," and "a lousy way of finding out if somebody is a double agent.” 

Maybe the polygraphers have perfected their tests since then? I doubt it. Maybe they’ve dramatically improved their craft, but there are still too many variables at work in the tests.

Now, I suppose that if Kash Patel’s rat catchers already have strong evidence of a suspect’s guilt—say, emails from one of Pete Hegseth’s many Pentagon critics to a reporter expressing alarm about the erratic defense secretary’s many indiscretions (the latest being revelations of his wife’s strange, outsize role in his office—the polygrapher’s job will be made easy.  Absent that, they’ll be fishing. Worse, given the unprecedented pressure on all government employees to demonstrate personal loyalty to the Trump regime, the examiner may well feel obligated to find people guilty no matter their innocence—along the way forcing their subjects to reveal personal details irrelevant to the leak probe but useful to MAGA loyalists in the agencies. 

It’s been done before, as Burnham reported in 1986, revealing that “an investigation published today by General Accounting Office for the Senate Armed Services Committee found that the training manual used by the military until late November suggested asking about a subject's political, racial and religious affiliations and whether the subject had engaged in a variety of sex acts or had ever 'been a party to an abortion.’”  That was under the evangelists-supported Reagan administration.  

The revelation prompted the Defense Department to abolish the training manual, Burnham reported. But who can be confident that the right-to-life-fervent Trump appointees now populating the National Security Council, Pentagon, FBI, CIA, NSA or other components of the military and intelligence community won’t unleash their MAGA zealotry on career officials who’ve sworn loyalty to the Constitution—not the wannabe monarch occupying the White House?

As Nakashima and Natanson reported on Monday, the administration’s “investigations into alleged leaks to the news media, in some cases using polygraph tests…are creating a climate of fear and intimidation.” 

Maybe that’s the point.

The probe has already crashed through important guardrails, they found:  “The ramp-up has been bolstered by Attorney General Pam Bondi’s new legal guidelines that allow the Justice Department to subpoena reporters’ personal communications and broaden the scope of potential criminal prosecution to leaks of not just classified material, but also ‘privileged and other sensitive’ information that the administration says is ‘designed to sow chaos and distrust’ in the government.

So we’re back to the bad old days?  

The hypocrisy of Trump officials pursuing leaks is breathtaking.  

Ignoring security rules to discuss war plans and other highly sensitive subjects on personal Signal apps (which a former top U.S. counterintelligence official told SpyTalk has “almost certainly” been penetrated by Chinese and other adversary hackers)? No problem. An alcoholic SecDef including his uncleared wife, personal lawyer and other political appointees in classified military and foreign policy chats on Signal? No problem. Personal cell phones in restricted areas?  No problem.

(Last December the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned consumers that Chinese hackers were waging a "broad and significant cyber-espionage campaign" to infiltrate commercial telecoms and steal users' data — and in isolated cases, to record phone calls.” In 2023 it was reported that Chinese hackers had used a fake version of Signal for Android users and “loaded them onto the Google Play and Samsung Galaxy Stores” to encourage their use, according to security researchers at ESET, a leading cybersecurity firm. In addition it was reported in February that “multiple Russia-aligned threat actors have been observed targeting individuals of interest via the privacy-focused messaging app Signal to gain unauthorized access to their accounts.”)

In short, these guys are walking security nightmares, yet they’re frantic about leaks that reveal their own careless, irresponsible behavior?  Give me a freaking break. The only positive takeaway here  is that their excesses and stupidity will no doubt pop up in every day’s news.

This article by Jeff Stein originally appeared on Spytalk.co.