FBI Won’t Validate Condit Test

The FBI declined Friday to rule on the validity of a privately arranged polygraph test that indicates Rep. Gary A. Condit had no involvement in Chandra Levy’s disappearance. The bureau’s decision effectively means that authorities will not accept Condit’s test results.

In a brief statement issued by the bureau’s Washington field office, which has assigned agents to the missing intern’s case, officials cited “long-standing policy” in not using polygraph data “submitted by an outside entity.”

“There is no way to verify the totality of the circumstances under which the examination was conducted,” the bureau said.

Official spokesmen for Condit would not respond publicly to the FBI decision, though a source close to Condit said the FBI’s move was expected.

“Our inference is that the test would have been technically acceptable, but they just don’t use outside polygraphs,” the source said.

But if Condit’s intimates expected an FBI denial from the start, suggested one official familiar with the Levy probe, “then the whole test was nothing but a publicity ploy.”

Barry Colvert, a former FBI polygraph examiner who administered the test to Condit, met with FBI agents and polygraph experts for 1 1/2 hours Wednesday, trying to persuade the bureau to accept his results. Abbe Lowell, Condit’s lawyer who hired Colvert, said last week that the congressman appeared not to be deceptive in answering that he knew nothing of Levy’s disappearance or whereabouts.

D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey has complained openly all week about Condit’s private test, belittling it as “useless” and “not credible” without the presence of police and FBI investigators working on the Levy probe.

Ramsey and other police officials also have complained that investigators who have seen the results and the raw data from the polygraph had difficulty with the material because questions to Condit were not included.

“All they have is a graph, and they can’t associate a graph with a specific question,” Ramsey said in an interview earlier in the week. “We can’t tell whether or not the question was, ‘Are your shoes black?’ or ‘Did you kill Chandra Levy?’ ”

The FBI also refrained from ruling on the private test because an opinion midway through the investigation “would hamper any future testing that might be conducted by the FBI.” Police have used FBI polygraph examiners already in tests administered to several others questioned in the probe.

Frank Horvath, a criminal justice professor at Michigan State University who is an expert on polygraphs, said he suspects the FBI is “trying to pressure Mr. Condit to submit to their own polygraph because they want to explore other avenues of the investigation with him.”

In another development, police released a list of 30 Web sites among several dozen Internet pages that Levy scrolled through May 1 in a final three-hour burst of activity before she disappeared.

One site was for Rock Creek Park, prompting a four-day police search this week through the sprawling urban park that netted old shoes and animal bones. There were also travel sites, including Amtrak and Southwest Airlines.

Levy, of Modesto, visited newspaper sites, among them the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Modesto Bee and the Washington City Paper. She used Web engines such as Yahoo and Google. She scanned sites for Baskin-Robbins ice cream and the Mr. Showbiz and Matt Drudge gossip sites. And she peered at several sites that involved Condit, including pages for the House and its Agriculture Committee, on which Condit has a seat.

There were also published reports Friday that Condit had been observed throwing an object into a trash can in Alexandria, Va., several hours before his condominium was searched by police last week. Investigators reportedly recovered a watch case and traced it back to a friend of the congressman.

CNN and several other news organizations also reported that a Modesto minister who had earlier alleged his daughter had an affair with Condit, whose district includes Modesto, recanted his story in an interview with FBI agents.

And Newsweek reported that Condit was meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney at the moment on May 1 when Levy was finishing up her search of Web sites, her last known activity. That would not necessarily represent an alibi for the congressman having any direct role in her disappearance because it is not known how long after her computer session Levy vanished.