Trump fires national security officials after activist alleges disloyalty

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.

The firings 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.

One person familiar with the development said at least three NSC officials had been fired, including Brian Walsh, who was responsible for intelligence issues, and Thomas Boodry, the legislative affairs director who previously worked for Waltz when he was a member of the US Congress.

The White House also fired David Feith, the senior director for technology. Feith is a China hawk who would have played an instrumental role in pushing security-related measures against Beijing, including export controls.

A second person said Waltz had been under increasing pressure from the Maga camp who viewed him as a neocon with very hawkish foreign policy views on countries from Iran to China. Another person said the ousters suggested Waltz himself was increasingly on thin ice since he was unable to protect his people. 

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”.

When asked about the dismissals, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that “we’re always going to let go of people we don’t like or people that we don’t think can do the job or people that may have loyalties to someone else”.

He denied firing the officials at Loomer’s urging. “She makes recommendations of things and people, and sometimes I listen to those recommendations, like I do with everybody.”

Loomer has also taken aim at Alex Wong, the deputy national security adviser, and Ivan Kanapathy, the senior NSC director for Asia. Wong and Kanapathy are respected China hawks. Several people familiar with the situation said it would be a bad omen for China policy if they were fired.

Loomer has also called Wong, a Chinese American foreign policy expert, the “Chinese national security adviser” in a social media post. The activist has targeted Kanapathy, a retired fighter pilot, because he worked for a consultancy that employees a few senior Democrats previously criticised by the Trump administration.  

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 Pentagon’s watchdog, the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General, announced on Thursday that it had launched a probe into defence secretary Pete Hegseth’s use of Signal over the incident and whether he complied with classification and record retention policies.

“The objective of this evaluation is to determine the extent to which the secretary of defence and other DoD personnel complied with DoD policies and procedures for the use of a commercial messaging application for official business,” acting inspector general Steven Stebbins wrote in a memo on Thursday.

Stebbins said he launched the investigation after senators Roger Wicker and Jack Reed, the top Republican and Democrat, respectively, on the powerful Senate armed services committee requested the inquiry.

“Per our long-standing policy, we don’t comment on ongoing investigations,” the Pentagon said in a statement.

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 the president’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.

She 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.