News

Trump ‘considering putting his staff under a lie detector’ and people are making the same point

Picture:
Picture:
Chip Somodevilla/Getty and Twitter

Donald Trump “constantly” talked about ordering lie detector tests during major White House leaks, according to a former official.

“He talked about it a lot,” the former White House official told Politico, and another added:

He wanted to polygraph every employee in the building to unearth who it was who spoke to the press.

Trump has often complained about leaks that painted his office in a negative light, including Trump’s calls with the Ukrainian president and his past comments about purchasing Greenland, among other things.

It appears that such leaks bother the US president, prompting him to frequently talk about giving polygraph tests to his staff.

Such was his anger, the publication claimed, that some staff members volunteered to take polygraphs to demonstrate they weren’t the leaker.

“It was something that was discussed and people were trying to placate the president and trying to show that they were taking it as personally and just as seriously as he was,” another former White House official said.

Taking that line of, ‘Oh yeah, we have to polygraph people’ was a way to ingratiate themselves with him, but it wasn’t an idea that ever went anywhere because it was absurd.

During Anthony Scaramucci’s brief stint as White House communications director in July 2017, the president had him searching for the leakers too.

"What I want to do is I want to f***ing kill all the leakers and I want to get the President's agenda on track so we can succeed for the American people,' he told The New Yorker, after which point he was fired after just seven days.

Needless to say, people reacted as you would expect – given Trump’s embattled relationship with the truth…

More: Leave.EU apologises over tweet of 'xenophobic' Angela Merkel poster after furious backlash

More: People are not into Ellen DeGeneres defending her friendship with George Bush

The Conversation (0)
x