What I want to talk about is: "She passed a polygraph test administered by a former F.B.I. agent..."
1. Does the status "former F.B.I. agent" convey professionalism and aloofness from partisanship? That reputation has taken a big hit these days. I don't mean to say anything about the particular FBI person who did the questioning and interpreted the results (identified in the NYT as Jerry Hanafin), but I can't read "former FBI" to mean not a political partisan.
2. Does one "pass" a "polygraph test"? From the Washington Examiner (a conservative newspaper):
“The polygraph is not a lie detector,” said [Thomas Mauriello, former senior polygraph examiner who worked at the Defense Department for 30 years, current a part-time professor in the University of Maryland’s criminology and criminal justice department]. “Let’s make that clear. There is no such thing as a lie detector. It’s simply an investigative tool that will record physiological reactions when you’re asked a question and give a response.”
He said if a person being tested doesn’t have a physical response to a question, that’s not necessarily a guarantee that he or she is being truthful or honest. Mauriello said there are even medications called beta blockers that a person can take to prohibit such bodily reactions....
Experts said that the way the results of a test are assessed is largely subject to who is doing the evaluation, and that the way an examiner formulates his or her questions can produce varying results. In other words, whether a person “passes” or “fails” a polygraph test depends greatly on who conducts it.
“In cases like this, as surreal as it may sound, people can ask for second opinion,” said James Gagliano, a former FBI supervisory agent who now teaches homeland security and criminal justice leadership at St. John’s University in New York.... Polygraph administrators, he said, aim to determine a subject's physical “baseline” by asking a series of innocuous questions like their name and favorite sports teams. He said then, an administrator may ask more "uncomfortable" questions and that the test could register a physical response, such as an increase in heart rate....
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