[song]

According to what I understood defeating the polygraph is not necessarily a crime. What is a crime is to "knowingly help someone lie to a federal agent". If the agents didn't give him any stories about a crime they committed, then he could have claimed that he didn't knowingly help them to lie since there was no lie that he knew about.

By having one of the agent talk about the cocaine smuggling or the other agent talk about sexual abuse, it made the case much stronger because it proved clearly that he was knowingly helping someone to lie to a federal agent since the lie had been made clear by the agents.

The reason I say that it's entrapment is that they've manipulated him into committing a crime by doing this.

One thing I'm not clear about American law is if, in this kind of cases, all records are given of the interactions between the agent and the defendant or not. If not and if the defendant's lawyer doesn't have access to the records, then it's very easy to use certain parts of the recordings to make a much stronger case than would be possible otherwise. Out of context quotes can incriminate people very easily. And in that case, depending on what would be hidden, it's entirely possible that he wouldn't have actually helped someone in a similar situation.

Now this is my interpretation based on what I understand, I'm not a lawyer and all that :-)...