Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Kristi Noem made the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) take a lie detector test to confirm that he didn’t leak information from a private meeting.
Cameron Hamilton, FEMA’s acting administrator, took the test on March 25—two weeks after meeting with Noem, who is known as “Ice Barbie” for posing for PR shots at detention centers and immigration raids, and Corey Lewandowski, an adviser to President Donald Trump. DHS acknowledged the test in an email to the agency’s employees, two former senior FEMA officials told Politico.
Lie detectors are not admissible as evidence in court because of their questionable reliability, but law enforcement uses them to help in investigations anyway.
The meeting with Hamilton comes a day after Noem pledged to eliminate FEMA in a meeting televised on C-SPAN. Noem’s statement blindsided FEMA officials, with one telling Politico, “We heard about it on TV like everyone else.”
On March 24, Hamilton addressed hundreds of state and local emergency managers in a speech at a conference in Washington, D.C., in which he outlined his vision for improving FEMA’s ability to respond to disasters while shifting some responsibilities to state governments.
“There is a federal interagency coordinated stratosphere, if you will, of resources. But navigating that is complex, not always the easiest to understand,” he said.
A former Navy SEAL, Hamilton has no formal background in emergency management but got the role because Trump decided not to appoint a permanent FEMA administrator.
Since 2009, every FEMA administrator had previously run a state emergency management agency, making Hamilton an outlier.
It was earlier this month that Noem promised to use polygraphs to figure out who might be leaking information about operations to the media, CBS reported.
In a video posted to social media on March 7, Noem’s caption read that the department had “identified two leakers of information here at the Department of Homeland Security who have been telling individuals about our operations and putting law enforcement lives in jeopardy. We plan to prosecute these two individuals and hold them accountable for what they’ve done.”
