Trump Purges
National Security Team After Laura Loomer Calls for Heads to Roll in Oval
Office Meeting
Watchman comment: I hope and pray Alex Wong, neo-con and link to Alex Greenberg, got fired.
Far-right
activist Laura
Loomer called for heads to roll in an Oval Office meeting
with President Donald Trump on
Wednesday — and Trump took her advice the next morning.
After Oliver Darcy delivered
the initial scoop about
the meeting, The New York Times shed
further light on it:
“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.”
“Mr. Trump may act on some of Ms. Loomer’s recommendations,”
added the Times.
But on Wednesday afternoon, she [Loomer]
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 non-secure
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.
Then on
Thursday, Axios reported that the president had indeed laid off several members
of his national security team.
Several members of President Trump’s
embattled National Security Council have been fired, a U.S. official and a
second source familiar told Axios on Thursday.
Why it matters: The firings come a day
after Laura Loomer visited the Oval Office and pressed Trump to fire specific
NSC staffers. Axios has not confirmed whether the firings were directly linked
to that incident, but the source familiar said they were “being labeled as an anti-neocon move.”
Behind the scenes: The U.S. official said Loomer was furious that
“neocons” had “slipped through” the vetting process for administration jobs,
referring to hawkish foreign policy views commonly associated with the Bush
administration.