Having warned previously that the DOJ would crack down brutally on any current and future leakers, Attorney General Jeff Sessions appears ready to follow through with this threat, and according to Axios, he has told co-workers he is seeking to put the entire National Security Council staff through a lie detector test "to root out leakers."
While it is unclear if Sessions will follow through, the AG reportedly floated the idea to multiple people, as recently as last month.
As Axios details the upcoming crackdown, Sessions' idea is to do a one-time, one-issue, polygraph test of everyone on the NSC staff. Interrogators would sit down with every single NSC staffer (there's more than 100 of them), and ask them, individually, what they know about the leaks of transcripts of the president's phone calls with foreign leaders. Sessions suspects those leaks came from within the NSC, and thinks that a polygraph test — at the very least — would scare them out of leaking again.
Sessions has told associates he likes the idea of targeting the foreign leader phone calls because there's a small enough universe of people who would have had access to these transcripts. Also, the idea that the President of the United States can't have private conversations with foreign leaders was a bridge too far, even for Democrats.
Perhaps more than anything, such a dramatic turn of events by the DOJ, would demonstrate how frustrated he's become about the rampant leaking of classified information. Then again, as Axios observes, Sessions seems to understand that it's extremely tough to successfully prosecute leakers, especially when they are career intelligence professionals who are skilled at covering their digital tracks.