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President Donald Trump has fired a number of senior officials of his National Security Council after a far-right activist claimed they were disloyal to his “Make America Great Again” agenda, US media reported on Thursday.
The firings reportedly occurred after a meeting on Wednesday in the White House between Trump and the rightwing social media personality and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, who presented him with research into certain members of the NSC and urged him to sack them.
The Oval Office encounter was first reported by The New York Times, which said Loomer attacked the officials in front of their boss, the national security adviser Mike Waltz, who was present at the meeting alongside vice-president JD Vance and other senior officials.
A spokesperson for the NSC, Brian Hughes, refused to confirm or deny the firings, saying only that the NSC “doesn’t comment on personnel matters”.
Waltz was under pressure before the meeting over revelations that he had created a chat group on Signal, a commercially available messaging app, to discuss details of a military strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen and had inadvertently invited a journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of The Atlantic, to join.
The NSC’s role is to advise and assist the president on national security and foreign policy and is his principal arm for coordinating these policies among various government agencies.
Loomer is one of the most controversial figures in Trump’s circle. The activist has called the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US an “inside job” and has often garnered public attention with her intemperate attacks on Trump’s enemies.
Loomer, who travelled on Trump’s plane during last year’s election campaign, has also been part of a group that has attacked members of the White House staff, using information about their prior employment history to cast aspersions on their loyalty to the president and his Maga agenda.
Loomer posted on X on Thursday that it had been an “honor” to meet Trump and “present him with my research findings”, but declined to divulge any of the details of her meeting.
“I will continue working hard to support his agenda, and I will continue reiterating the importance of, and the necessity of STRONG VETTING, for the sake of protecting the President of the United States of America, and our national security,” she added.
Earlier, Loomer had launched an attack on X on what she described as a “lack of vetting” at the NSC, claiming people with “close proximity to Trump haters” had been elevated to senior roles in national security and intelligence.
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