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 may 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 characters 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 others even 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 was 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 than 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.
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 the website X, questioned Mr. Wong’s loyalty to the administration because his wife worked as a Justice Department lawyer during the Biden and Obama administrations, and because her father had been a large shareholder in a Chinese satellite maker. 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.”
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. Seated next to her was Representative Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania congressman 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.
During the roughly 30-minute encounter, those people said, 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.
Maggie Haberman is a White House correspondent, reporting on the second, nonconsecutive term of Donald J. Trump. More about Maggie Haberman
Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter covering the administration of Donald J. Trump. More about Jonathan Swan
Ken Bensinger covers media and politics for The Times. More about Ken Bensinger
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