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FBI Director Kash Patel allowed Deputy Director Dan Bongino and two other senior FBI staffers to skip standard polygraph exams, according to a Friday ProPublica report backed up by government and former bureau sources.
ProPublica’s William Turton and Christopher Bing found no record of Bongino ever sitting for a polygraph, something insiders told them was “unprecedented.” Instead, they found that Patel personally issued the waiver that cleared Bongino for access despite the missing exam, a step former FBI officials said they had almost never seen granted at that level.
Bongino, a former Secret Service agent who later became a prominent conservative media personality, was appointed as the bureau’s No. 2 despite having no prior FBI experience. The deputy director receives some of the government’s most sensitive intelligence, including the President’s Daily Brief, which makes the absence of a standard vetting exam especially unusual, former officials told the outlet.
Two other Patel-installed senior figures — congressional liaison Marshall Yates and Patel’s personal assistant Nicole Rucker — “did not clear their polygraph exam and were granted waivers by Patel,” according to the report. All three ultimately received access to sensitive compartmented information (SCI), among the highest levels of classified material.
Former senior FBI members told ProPublica they could not recall comparable waivers. One said only a single waiver had been issued over seven years under former Director Christopher Wray — and that was for an outside expert whose results were inconclusive. “Most of us had taken multiple polygraphs,” said Bob Anderson, a former FBI executive who ran the counterintelligence division.
FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson told ProPublica, “It is false that the individuals you referenced failed polygraphs.” He added that their article was “riddled with falsehoods,” misrepresented polygraph protocol, and made “multiple false claims about FBI employees who have done nothing wrong.”
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