Laura Loomer, the far-right activist and promoter of conspiracy theories, met on Wednesday with President Trump in the Oval Office, where she pressed for him to fire National Security Council staff members whom she deemed disloyal to him, according to seven people with knowledge of the events.
Mr. Trump is likely to act on some of Ms. Loomer’s recommendations, two of the people 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, two of the people said. She proceeded to excoriate them in front of their boss, the national security adviser Michael Waltz, who was also in the meeting.
Ms. Loomer’s rhetoric and actions have been so extreme that she has alienated even others on the far right. She has shared a conspiracy theory on social media calling the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks an “inside job.” During the 2024 campaign, Ms. Loomer said that “the White House will smell like curry” if Kamala Harris were elected, a jab at her Indian heritage. During the Republican primary campaign, in which she served as Mr. Trump’s online attack dog against Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Ms. Loomer floated the baseless notion that Mr. DeSantis’s wife, Casey, had lied about having breast cancer.
But on Wednesday afternoon, she sat with the president in the Oval Office, plying him with claims about staff members whom she insisted he should dismiss. News of her attendance was first reported by the newsletter Status, but the details of what was discussed had not been revealed.
The meeting came after a recent string of social media attacks by Ms. Loomer on Trump administration officials, including Alex Wong, the deputy national security adviser. Mr. Wong’s boss, Mr. Waltz, has been under fire from detractors both inside and outside the administration for more than a week after the revelation that he created a group on Signal, a nonsecure commercial messaging app, to discuss sensitive details of a military strike in Yemen and inadvertently added a journalist to the chat.
Mr. Waltz was already on
shaky footing before the incident and now may lose the ability to protect his staff from dismissals, with several senior staff members potentially on the chopping block. Mr. Trump has spoken somewhat sympathetically about Mr. Wong in some of his private conversations with advisers.
But Ms. Loomer, in posts on X, questioned Mr. Wong’s loyalty to the administration because his wife had worked at the Justice Department during the Biden and Obama administrations. Mr. Wong’s wife was also a career prosecutor and Justice Department official during Mr. Trump’s first term and a clerk for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Ms. Loomer has referred to her as a “Chinese woman” and alleged that the family was part of a conspiracy. She speculated that Mr. Wong was responsible for adding The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to the group chat “on purpose as part of a foreign opp to embarrass the Trump administration on behalf of China.”
She also attacked Mr. Wong’s father-in-law, who is of Taiwanese descent and was a large shareholder in what was a British-owned satellite-making company based in Hong Kong.
Ms. Loomer, reached by phone, declined to comment. A White House spokesman and an N.S.C. spokesman did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
The meeting with Ms. Loomer came shortly before Mr. Trump’s major tariff announcement late Wednesday afternoon in the White House Rose Garden. Vice President JD Vance; Mr. Waltz; the head of presidential personnel, Sergio Gor; the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles; and Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, were also in the Oval Office, according to three of the people briefed on the meeting.
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. The commerce secretary, Howard 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.
During the roughly 30-minute encounter, attendees discussed dismissing a number of government workers. Mr. Waltz attended only briefly, so that he could defend his staff, according to one of the people briefed on what took place.
A longtime supporter of Mr. Trump who has frequently spoken of her desire to work him, Ms. Loomer was a dogged and combative ally during the 2024 campaign. But Mr. Trump distanced himself from her in the race’s final stretch after he invited her on his plane to travel to the debate with Joseph R. Biden Jr. and then to a series of events commemorating the Sept. 11 attacks. Ms. Loomer’s presence at the memorial events, and on his plane, provoking widespread outrage.
Still, Ms. Loomer has remained in contact with some of Mr. Trump’s aides and has, for the most part, fiercely defended the president while blitzing perceived opponents and enemies with searing attacks shared with her 1.5 million followers on X. She has complained in recent weeks that she has not received an invitation to sit in the “new media seat” at the White House press briefings, despite having applied unsuccessfully for a press pass.
But her appearance at the White House this week seemed to signal a return to good graces for Ms. Loomer, prompted in significant part by her becoming a kind of grand inquisitor for the administration, rooting out officials she deems insufficiently faithful to Mr. Trump.
Three weeks ago, she published a series of posts on X tracking the movements of Mr. Biden’s son Hunter while he was in South Africa, complaining that he received Secret Service protection.
A few days later, Hunter Biden’s
security detail was revoked, along with that of his sister, Ashley Biden. Later, the Secret Service protection for Alejandro Mayorkas, the former homeland security secretary, was also canceled.
Then last week, she singled out an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, Adam Schleifer, who had unsuccessfully run for Congress as a Democrat in 2020. Less than two hours after she called him a “Trump hater” who should be fired on X,
Mr. Schleifer was terminated.
Since then, she has publicly called for the dismissals of Maria Proestou, a deputy assistant secretary of the Navy; Ivan Kanapathy, the National Security Council director for Asia; Amer Ghalib, the mayor of Hamtramck, Mich., who is Mr. Trump’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Kuwait; and Katrina Fotovat, the head of the State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues. In at least one case, Ms. Loomer tagged Mr. Gor, the White House’s head of personnel.
In addition, Ms. Loomer said the L.G.B.T.Q. liaison at the Veterans Affairs Department’s Center for Minority Veterans should be fired, as well as an unidentified staff member working in the N.S.C.’s intelligence office who she said was transgender and “hates President Trump.”
“If you are aware of this person and have their name, please send it to me and I will post their identity,” Ms. Loomer wrote on X on Saturday. “The American people deserve to know who this Trans Biden holdover is that is embedded in our intel community.”
Last month she started her own research and vetting firm, called Loomered Strategies, that she said would provide high-level opposition research for hire. The term refers to what she and others call “getting Loomered,” which is when she targets someone, either in ambush-style interviews or online. She has also tried to dig up dirt on officials outside the administration, either because they have gotten in Mr. Trump’s way or because she questions their loyalty.
In recent weeks, she has claimed that two federal judges who issued rulings blocking Mr. Trump’s efforts to deport noncitizens were compromised because of the activities of their adult children.
In a March 17 post that went viral, Ms. Loomer said that Judge James E. Boasberg, who barred the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador under a 1798 law, had a conflict because his daughter works for a nonprofit that provides legal support to people facing criminal charges. Several days later she said that Judge Jesse M. Furman, who blocked the deportation of the Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, should be recused because his son was once an intern for Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
Still, at times she worked against some people Mr. Trump considers allies, including Elon Musk, whom she criticized last year over his support for visas for high-skilled immigrants.
Some of Mr. Trump’s far-right allies consider Ms. Loomer useful to attack common enemies. And Mr. Trump, for his part, has mostly been admiring of Ms. Loomer’s tactics. Speaking at an event, he once singled her out in the crowd.
“You don’t want to be Loomered,” Mr. Trump said. “If you’re Loomered, you’re in deep trouble. That’s the end of your career in a sense. Thanks, Laura.”
