President Trump fired six 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 six officials were among those vilified by Ms. Loomer during the meeting on Wednesday, the official said. Ms. Loomer walked into the White House with a sheaf of papers, which amounted to a mass of opposition research attacking the character and loyalty of numerous N.S.C. officials. She proceeded to excoriate them in front of Michael Waltz, the national security adviser, who was also in the meeting.
It was a remarkable spectacle: Ms. Loomer, a Sept. 11 conspiracy theorist who is viewed as extreme even by some of Mr. Trump’s far-right allies, apparently wielding more influence over the staff of the National Security Council than Mr. Waltz, who runs the agency.
Mr. Waltz was not among those who were fired; nor was one of Ms. Loomer’s top targets, the deputy national security adviser Alex Wong, the U.S. official said. Apart from the firings, several other officials who had been detailed to the council were reassigned back to their home agencies over the weekend, even before the White House meeting.
The account of the White House meeting and the subsequent firings is based on interviews with eight people with knowledge of the events. They asked for anonymity to discuss confidential meetings and discussions.
Ms. Loomer has been part of a group effort by some Trump allies to disparage members of the president’s White House staff whom they consider too hawkish, too eager to commit American troops around the world and fundamentally at odds with Mr. Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.
The agitators have used the phrase “neocon” — short for neoconservative — to describe many of those staff members working for Mr. Waltz.
The roughly 30-minute meeting with Ms. Loomer 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 was seated directly across the desk from the president. Next to her was Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican who was one of Mr. Trump’s biggest allies in his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. Mr. Perry had a separate list of staff concerns he wanted to discuss with the president, and his planned meeting with Mr. Trump collided with Ms. Loomer’s, one of the people briefed on the events said.
Mr. Perry and one of his aides did not immediately respond to text messages seeking comment.
Mr. Trump’s scheduled meetings often collapse into one another. Mr. Lutnick, whose brother died in the Sept. 11 attacks, had attended a trade meeting just before Ms. Loomer’s and Mr. Perry’s meeting, and was present for a portion of it, one of the people briefed on the matter said. A spokesman for Mr. Lutnick did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
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’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, into 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 Mr. Waltz. 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.
