President Trump fired at least three senior National Security Council officials after an extraordinary meeting in the Oval Office with the far-right activist Laura Loomer, who laid out a list of people she believed were disloyal to the president, according to a U.S. official with direct knowledge of the matter.
The three officials were among those vilified by Ms. Loomer during Wednesday’s meeting at the White House, the official said. Other members of the N.S.C. are expected to be fired as part of the purge, the official added. Some of those officials had been detailed to the N.S.C. and were sent back to their home agencies over the weekend, even before the meeting.
Ms. Loomer has been part of a group effort from Trump allies to disparage members of the president’s White House staff. Their campaign has included online attacks about the staff members’ families, past employment and aspects of their backgrounds, including their professional associations, that have been used to claim they were either disloyal to Mr. Trump or ideologically unfit to serve in his administration.
The agitators have used the phrase “neocon” — short for neoconservative — to describe many of those staff members working for the national security adviser, Michael Waltz. The insinuation is that the officials are too hawkish, too eager to commit American troops around the world and are fundamentally at odds with Mr. Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.
Ms. Loomer, who has spread conspiracy theories about the Sept. 11 attacks and is viewed as extreme even by some of Mr. Trump’s far-right allies, presented her findings directly to the president in an Oval Office meeting on Wednesday afternoon. The meeting was also attended by Mr. Waltz, Vice President JD Vance and other senior officials including the chief of staff, Susie Wiles, the head of the personnel office, Sergio Gor, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Ms. Loomer brought along a sheaf of papers as purported evidence to buttress her attacks on the N.S.C. staff members.
For now, one of her top targets, the deputy national security adviser Alex Wong, has been spared, the U.S. official said.
It is unclear what the firings mean for Mr. Waltz, who has a tenuous hold on his own job. Mr. Trump has so far declined to terminate Mr. Waltz after he inadvertently invited the Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg onto a Signal group chat in which top officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, shared sensitive details about forthcoming military strikes against Houthi terrorists.
But senior officials who have discussed Mr. Waltz privately with the president say that Mr. Trump’s reluctance to fire his national security adviser is more a matter of him wanting to avoid bad publicity than a sign of confidence in him. Mr. Trump has made clear to his staff that he does not want to give the media the satisfaction of seeing Mr. Waltz fired. He also does not want to start the cycle of firing top officials that plagued his first term, they said.
To some in the government, the firings have felt arbitrary. Most if not all of the officials who have been targeted by Ms. Loomer were put through a personnel vetting process run by the Trump administration.