President Donald Trump fired multiple National Security Council officials after far-right conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer urged him to at a Wednesday meeting, according to multiple reports.
Loomer, an influential MAGA media figure, had excoriated several top aides whom she deemed disloyal to Trump during the Oval Office discussion while National Security Adviser Mike Waltz looked on, The New York Times reported.
The meeting came after last week’s Signal leak fiasco, in which Waltz accidentally added a prominent journalist to a group chat in which Trump’s top aides were discussing an upcoming strike on terrorists in Yemen on the commercial messaging app.
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While Waltz took “full responsibility” for the flub, Loomer has pushed tenuous links between Waltz’s aides and Trump’s adversaries over the last week on her X account, including former President Joe Biden and the Chinese Communist Party. She has suggested that the aides could have been responsible for adding Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, to the Signal group chat.
Loomer’s face-to-face meeting with Trump seems to have been convincing.
CNN reported that at least three aides were fired following the visit: director for intelligence Brian Walsh; senior director for legislative affairs Thomas Boodry; and senior director for technology and national security David Feith.
It was not clear whether Deputy National Security Adviser Alex Wong, who bore Loomer’s harshest criticism for his Chinese heritage, was among those fired, according to CNN.
A senior U.S. official, who believed the firings were linked to Loomer’s visit, described it to Axios as a “bloodbath.”
Brian Hughes, a spokesperson for the NSC, told the Daily Beast that it “doesn’t comment on personnel matters.”
Loomer, to whom the Daily Beast has reached out for comment, fired back at coverage of her meeting with Trump in an X post on Thursday.
“I woke up this morning to learn that there are still people in and around the West Wing who are LEAKING to the hostile, left-wing media about President Trump’s *confidential* and *private* meetings in the Oval Office,” she wrote.
“Out of respect for President @realDonaldTrump and the privacy of the Oval Office, I’m going to decline on divulging any details about my Oval Office meeting with President Trump,” Loomer added. “It was an honor to meet with President Trump and present him with my research findings.”
The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment.
Ahead of the meeting, Loomer had attacked Wong, who was appointed by Trump, in a series of widely circulated posts on X. She leapt on the fact that Wong’s wife, Candice Chiu Wong, was an assistant U.S. attorney under Biden and former President Barack Obama and alleged that her father had ties to the Communist Party.
“Why do we have a CHINESE Deputy National Security advisor who is married to a CHINESE US ATTORNEY who worked under Obama and Biden, and who helped prosecute J6ers after the stolen 2020 election?” she wrote in one post.
Loomer added that “it really makes you wonder if @JeffreyGoldberg, the reporter from the @TheAtlantic was added to the Trump Signal chat on purpose as part of a foreign opp to embarrass the Trump administration on behalf of China.”
Wong and his wife were defended from Loomer’s allegations of disloyalty by prominent Republicans.
“Alex Wong and his wife Candice are complete and total patriots, 100% MAGA Warriors who always put America First,” Sen. Tom Cotton wrote in an X post. “For three years, Alex worked hard for me until President Trump smartly hired him away. President Trump made another great decision to hire Alex as his Deputy National Security Adviser.
Mike Davis, a conservative lawyer and one of Trump’s most ardent supporters on social media, defended Candice Wong, whom he previously worked alongside, as a “a conservative Republican.”
An inside source with knowledge of the firings suggested to CNN that Waltz may have pushed to spare Wong.
Waltz himself has been on shaky footing with the Trump administration since the Signal scandal. Although the president publicly stood by him, he privately considered firing his national security adviser.
A longtime support of Trump, Loomer, 31, has drawn condemnation for supporting conspiracy theories. Despite suggesting that 9/11 was an “inside job,” Loomer was invited to join Trump at memorial events for the attacks while he was on the campaign trail last year.
Since Trump entered office, Loomer, who characterized herself as independent journalist, has frequently complained about her lack of access.
Although Trump’s White House has invited numerous fringe right-wing media outlets into the building and shaken up the press pool, Loomer has said she has been denied a press pass despite pushing for one.
“Why does @NPR have a White House correspondent but nobody from the press shop at the White House has approved my press credential? Doesn’t this seem odd?” Loomer wrote Thursday on X, shortly before news of the firings broke, in response to a Trump post calling to defund NPR.
Despite Loomer’s evident frustration at being on the outside of the president’s administration over the last few months, her exposés have frequently reverberated beyond the social media MAGAsphere.
Earlier this month, Loomer’s claim that Hunter Biden was escorted by 18 Secret Service agents while on an extended trip to South Africa set off a chain reaction that ended with Trump pulling the security detail for the former president’s son.
Loomer, who often engages in high-profile disputes, is currently suing TV host Bill Maher for defamation to the tune of $150 million after he joked that she had an affair with Trump.
Loomer said earlier on Thursday that she was cancelling Thursday’s edition of her live internet show, Loomer Unleashed, because she will be attending Maher’s deposition for the case.
