, presenter Steve Doocy asked President Trump's counselor Kellyanne Conway why they don't use lie detectors to identify who leaked the transcripts of President Trump's phone conversations with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto and Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull:
Steve Doocy: Kellyanne, well you know, because it is a finite number of people who would have had access to those phone calls that the President made to those world leaders back in January, a week into his tenure... I heard a commentator say they know exactly who had access to it, so call in every person, and go ahead and run a lie detector on them. Why don't they do that?
Kellyanne Conway: Well they may, and if-- they may, they may not. There are many different ways to discover who's leaking.
Conway seemed to downplay the possibility of a polygraph dragnet for leakers, while not ruling it out.
has a column on why lie detector "tests" for White House employees is a dumb idea:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/lie-detector-tests-white-house-employee... Kellyanne Conway can strap me onto a machine right now, because I’m not lying when I say this: Friday’s threat by the White House to use lie detectors against the staff to find leakers is the most outrageous thing I’ve heard from an administration that makes outrageous statements all day long.
We already know that President Trump is a horrendous boss — that was my angle last month when he turned his own attorney general into a publicly thwacked piñata.
But using lie detectors against one’s own employees is not only stupid — polygraphs aren’t admissible anyway — but it will backfire: suddenly, the employees you don’t trust will no longer put any trust in you.
Most important: It never works.
All administrations dating back to President Reagan have used polygraph tests against some senior intelligence officials who had access to classified information. But as both Reagan and President Obama well learned, the leaks kept coming.
Obama was so appalled by the leaks that his Director of National Intelligence James Clapper expanded the use of polygraph testing — but even he stopped short of ordering testing on White House employees.
Trump should follow Clapper’s lead and back down. Hiring an employee, then demanding a polygraph is the human resources equivalent of waterboarding (which we know Trump likes, after all).
Another reason it’s an awful idea? Richard Nixon wanted to do it in hopes of diverting attention from, you guessed it, a scandal (Watergate) and onto something that wasn’t a scandal at all, but was actually helping to save our democracy (leakers).
Nixon wanted “everyone” in the State Department strapped to a polygraph.
“Little people do not leak,” he told John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman in the Oval Office on July 24, 1971. “This crap ... is never-ending. I studied these cases long enough and it's always the son-of-a-b---h that leaks.”
When a third aide, Bud Krogh, tried to dissuade the President by reminding him that polygraph tests are inadmissible and civil servants can refuse, Nixon exploded.
“I don't give a good goddamn about that,” he said. “It's more important to find the source of these leaks, rather than worry about the civil rights of some bureaucrats.”
In the end, the henchman-President revealed his larger goal.
“I don't know anything about polygraphs, and I don't know how accurate they are, but I know they'll scare the hell out of people,” Nixon said.
And that’s all President Trump wants: to scare his underlings into serving him, rather than our democracy. Without leaks, the public can’t know what’s going on inside the White House — except for what the President puts on Twitter.
