Trump fires six national security staffers after meeting with far-right activist Laura Loomer
NEWS | 04 April 2025
Donald Trump fired six national security council staffers after a fraught meeting in the Oval Office where the far-right activist Laura Loomer presented opposition research against a number of staffers that she said showed they were disloyal to the US president, according to two people familiar with the matter. The firings encompassed four staffers who were fired overnight, after the meeting, and two who were removed over the weekend. It created the extraordinary situation where Loomer appeared to have more influence than the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, over the NSC and undercut Waltz in having aides axed under him. Loomer brought a booklet of papers laying out the perceived disloyalty of about a dozen staffers, including Waltz’s principal deputy, Alex Wong, to the meeting, which was also attended by JD Vance, the chief of staff Susie Wiles, the commerce secretary Howard Lutnick and Waltz himself. The fired officials included Brian Walsh, the senior director for intelligence who previously worked for now secretary of state Marco Rubio on the Senate intelligence committee; Thomas Boodry, the senior director for legislative affairs who previously served as Waltz’s legislative director in Congress; and Maggie Dougherty, the senior director for international organizations, the people said. While the firings appeared arbitrary, one of the people said that the White House looked through Loomer’s opposition research and verified parts of it. Ultimately, it found that one NSC official had recently criticized Trump on social media and others had ties to Republican establishment figures like the senators John McCain and Mitch McConnell, whom Trump despises. The firings did not include Wong, who has been one of Loomer’s top targets. Loomer has vilified Wong over the work of his wife, Candice, at the justice department, which involved prosecuting January 6 Capitol rioters. Loomer has also publicly suggested that Wong has sympathies with the Chinese communist party. Loomer did not immediately respond to questions sent by text about the alleged sins of the NSC officials she targeted. Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the NSC, did not respond to a request for comment. But in the days since Waltz inadvertently added a journalist from the Atlantic to a Signal group chat, where the defense secretary Pete Hegseth shared updates about a US military strike against the Houthis in Yemen, Loomer suggested Wong and other career NSC officials were trying to sabotage Trump by causing a scandal. She baselessly claimed Wong deliberately added the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to the sensitive chat “as part of a foreign opp to embarrass the Trump administration on behalf of China”. (The White House’s final internal conclusion, the Guardian has reported, was that Waltz added Goldberg by mistake himself.) Loomer has been part of a group of Trump allies to disparage Waltz and his team, calling them “neocons” – short for neo-conservatives – as a pejorative term to castigate them for being too hawkish and eager to project US military power abroad, at odds with Trump’s “America first” foreign policy. The online vilification of Waltz and his team took a turn on Wednesday when Loomer appeared at the White House for the meeting. It was not immediately certain how Loomer was cleared to access the White House complex given she lacks a “hard pass” even as a reporter, a sore issue she has complained about in recent weeks. Loomer sat directly across from Trump in the Oval Office as she made her pitch to him directly to remove the people she was targeting. The New York Times reported that the Republican representative Scott Perry, who had his own concerns about staffers in the administration, was also trying to meet with Trump at the same time. The effect on Waltz was not clear. He left the White House with Trump on Marine One on Thursday, which signaled support from the president, who last week declined to fire Waltz over the Signal chat episode. Waltz has also recently shown more deference to Wiles, the chief of staff, in an effort to win her support, the people said. But Waltz’s political enemies point out that Waltz survived the Signal chat episode principally because Trump was unwilling to give the news media a victory, and not because of his confidence in Waltz. His main ally is also perceived to be the senator Lindsey Graham, as opposed to a network of allies inside Trump’s inner circle.
Author: Joseph Gedeon. Hugo Lowell.
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