Hegseth Team Told to Stop Polygraph Tests after Complaint to White House

Yomiuri Shimbun

a day ago

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's use of polygraph tests to search for people leaking information to the news media was stopped at the direction of the White House after a senior adviser to Hegseth raised alarm to senior officials there about being targeted, U.S. officials and others familiar with the matter said.
The adviser, Patrick Weaver, complained to White House officials this spring with concerns that he could soon be directed by Hegseth or another member of his team to submit to a polygraph test, the people familiar with the matter said. The possibility angered Weaver, an immigration hawk seen within the administration as a loyal foot soldier to President Donald Trump and associate of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of concerns for reprisal from the Trump administration.
The White House intervention, which has not previously been reported, came in the form of a phone call by an individual close to the administration after Hegseth's team had begun administering polygraph tests to people around the defense secretary in April, according to people familiar with the matter, who declined to identify the individual.
Before they were stopped, multiple tests were carried out over several weeks with approval by Hegseth and advice from Tim Parlatore, who has served as both Hegseth's private attorney and a part-time military aide on his staff.
Weaver had previously served as a Republican congressional staff member and as an aide in the first Trump administration on the White House's National Security Council and in the Department of Homeland Security. He remains an adviser to Hegseth.
By the time he approached the White House, polygraph tests already had been administered to members of the Joint Service Interagency Advisory Group (JSIAG), a team in Hegseth's front office that was assembled to examine how to counter drug cartels and enhance security on the southern border, people familiar with the matter said. The team includes numerous Special Operations troops and representatives from other government agencies, including the FBI.
Col. Ricky Buria, a military aide whom Hegseth has since made a senior adviser, also took a polygraph test and received inconclusive results, officials said, a detail first reported by the Guardian. He submitted paperwork to retire from the Marine Corps and become a political appointee in April.
Tests also had been threatened by Hegseth against others, including two top military officers: Navy Adm. Christopher Grady, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Army Lt. Gen. Douglas A. Sims, the director of the Joint Staff. Those threats were first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Hegseth later decided to bypass promoting Sims to a four-star general, despite an earlier plan to do so and intervention from Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior Pentagon officials, people familiar with the matter said. That decision, first reported by the New York Times on Saturday, has irked a number of senior officers, who thought Sims had acted in an apolitical manner and deserved better.
The Pentagon declined to respond directly to the reporting about the polygraph tests.
'The Department will not comment on an ongoing investigation,' spokesman Sean Parnell said in a written statement. 'The Fake News Media's obsession with months old workplace gossip is a reflection of the sad and pathetic state of 'journalism' in Washington.'
The White House referred questions about the matter to the Pentagon. Weaver and Buria did not respond to requests for comment, while Parlatore declined to comment.
The polygraphs came during a period of tremendous upheaval in Hegseth's inner circle that included the defense secretary's firing of three senior Pentagon appointees in April and accusing them of leaking to the media. The aides – Dan Caldwell, Colin Carroll and Darin Selnick – disputed that and accused the Pentagon of slandering them. Hegseth's team has presented no evidence to back its claims.
The leak investigation began in March with a memo from Joe Kasper, then Hegseth's chief of staff, saying that 'unauthorized disclosures of national security information' demanded 'thorough investigation.'
'The use of polygraphs in the execution of this investigation will be in accordance with applicable law and policy,' Kasper wrote in the March 21 memo. The investigation would 'culminate in a report to the Secretary of Defense' and 'include a complete record of unauthorized disclosures within the Department of Defense and recommendations to improve such efforts.'
The turmoil was compounded just days later by the 'Signalgate' affair, in which Hegseth and other senior national security officials discussed a forthcoming bombing campaign against Houthi militants in Yemen in an unclassified group chat message that inadvertently included an editor from the Atlantic magazine.
Hegseth's role in the Signalgate matter has become especially controversial, since his account of planning for the strike, posted on the unclassified app, shared detailed information about the operation before it commenced.
The administration has repeatedly said that none of the information was classified. But witnesses later told the Defense Department inspector general's office as part of its ongoing investigation that the shared operational details were taken from a classified email labeled 'SECRET/NOFORN,' meaning release of the information to the public was considered potentially damaging to national security and should not include foreign officials.
Kasper voluntarily departed his role as chief of staff in April after months of infighting among Hegseth's senior staff, shifting to the private sector and a part-time Pentagon role as a special government employee. As he backfilled his inner circle around the same time, Hegseth named Buria, Parnell, Weaver and Justin Fulcher, an aide who had just had a falling out with colleagues at the U.S. DOGE Service, as senior advisers.
Fulcher also has since departed, exiting his role within days of a Washington Post report that he joined Hegseth's team after storming out of a meeting with a DOGE team leader at the Pentagon and claiming that law enforcement had been summoned to find him. Hegseth angrily confronted the DOGE leader, Yinon Weiss, who told others he had reported Fulcher to another government employee at the Pentagon rather than to the police.
Fulcher's actions had also drawn White House scrutiny after he told colleagues that he knew of surveillance measures that could be used to find leakers at the Pentagon, people familiar with the matter said, a detail first reported by the Guardian in June. He was assigned to work with Parlatore on the matter, but administration officials at the White House and the Pentagon later determined that Fulcher had exaggerated his usefulness and the purported evidence he alluded to did not exist, people familiar with the matter said.
Fulcher and Hegseth's team have said that his departure from the administration was a mutual decision. Others have questioned that, saying that it appears he was pushed out after losing the faith of senior administration officials.