Today, Explained - Laura Loomered the NSA

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

President Trump fired the head of the NSA — not because of a cyber attack, but because conservative activist Laura Loomer said so. How did she become so influential? This episode was produced by Gabrielle Berbey and Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Amanda Lewellyn, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Far-right activist Laura Loomer. Photo by Jacob M. Langston for The Washington Post via Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When President Trump fired Timothy Hawk, the head of the National Security Administration and U.S. Cyber Command last week, he didn't say why. But Laura Loomer, who'd met with Trump a day earlier, took credit. She said on Twitter that Hawk was disloyal to President Trump. Laura Loomer, chaos agent, activist, proud Islamophobe, her words, influencer, trickster, trespasser. I'm just really confused. You're words, influencer, trickster, trespasser. — I'm just really confused. — You're on private property, so you're trespassing.

— I'm really confused. Nancy said everyone was welcome here. Did you know who Nancy Pelosi is? — Yes, I did. — She has Trump's ear, maybe even his respect. — You don't want to be lumbered. If you're lumbered, you're in deep trouble. — And she's just getting started in Washington.

That's ahead on Today Explained. Hey, it's Cam Hayward, defensive tackle for the Pittsburgh Steelers and host of Not Just Football podcast. The NFL draft is coming fast. And over the next few episodes, we're going to be talking about it, diving deep and also bringing the draft party to Pittsburgh for a special live taping to have some fun. You're not going to want to miss it. So tune in to our show, Not Just Football, with me, Cam Hayward, for a special draft coverage brought to you by Verizon Business. You can find us on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Thursday, May 8th is McHappy Day when every menu item purchased at McDonald's helps support

families with sick children. So you can feel the good that comes from doing good just from ordering. So if I order a Big Mac, I'm helping. Yep. What about a McFlurry? 10 piece chicken, McNuggets and apple pie? You got it. Every single order helps. Join us at McDonald's for McHappy Day on Thursday, May 8th. Do good, feel good. A portion of food and beverage sales will support RMHC chapters and local children's charities across Canada. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King and some of the best reporting I've seen on Laura Loomer comes from The Wall Street Journal's Vera Bergen-Gruin. Vera is a national security reporter who also covered the online right for a time, and so

she knows her Laura Loomer lore. Laura Loomer is a far-right internet personality. She kind of defies characterization, to be honest. I am the most censored person in this country, hands down, if not the most censored woman in the world. She's only 31, which seems to surprise a lot of people because, you know, she's been around for a long time. And she's from Arizona and kind of has built a whole career ever since she graduated from college, out of being Donald Trump's,

you know, hatchet woman on the internet and doing these publicity stunts and these, you know, these kind of shock tactics against anyone she thinks is this loyal to President Trump. There's a story about Laura Loomer that I heard a while back that I really love. When she was in college, she tried to start a chapter supporting ISIS on her college campus. An honor student at Barry University told instructors she wanted to start that group to help promote education in the Islamic State, but she was working undercover for a nonprofit. Project Veritas alleges the school is sympathetic to the terror group ISIS, and they argue a

secretly recorded video taken by a student proves it. Laura Loomer is like, she's like a prankster. Tell us about some of the pranks. Exactly. And it's clear she's always been this way. She's not someone who necessarily picked it up recently from when these things became popular, right?

But she seems to be a big fan of, you know, Project Veritas, you know, which is another kind of right wing stunt outfit, for lack of a better word. I'm James O'Keefe with Project Veritas. You're on camera here talking about giving anal sex toys and butt plugs to little children. Sir, why are you running? Why are you running away? But she basically loves to do these very public things that she films on video. For example, she tried to vote wearing a burka under the name of Huma Abedin, who was Hillary

Clinton's aide in 2016, to make a point about voter fraud. And these things always push very much towards offensive and towards, you know, just really attention calling. Why are you supporting the weaponization of governments against President Trump? My name's Laura Lumer. Oh gosh, you're the crazy person. No, I'm the crazy person. I think you're the crazy person supporting the weaponization of governments against Donald Trump. You don't need to run for president, fat ass. You need to get on a treadmill and run.

You just got Lumer'd, bitch. She disrupted a production of Julius Caesar in 2017 in Central Park. Freedom! No criminalization of political violence against the right! Get off the stage! All right, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to pause. We're going to pause security. Because they were trying to make, you know, they were being satirical about Trump and

she didn't like that. I'm protecting our constitution. I'm using my constitutional right of free speech and protest to protest against the bastardization of Shakespeare, really. She's chained herself to, you know, the doors of Twitter's headquarters. My name is Laura Limmer.

I'm a conservative, investigative journalist. And today I'm here at Twitter. And on this side, that's the tweet that I was permanently banned for. She's appeared at politicians' homes and all of this is just always recorded and promoted and posted on social media. And none of it's ever quite cohesive. It's not always necessarily very smart, but it's very attention calling because she's

trying to make a point. How did Laura Loomer and President Trump actually meet? So apparently, you know, she was always a huge Trump fan, and she at some point just must have gotten onto his radar, sometimes his very vocal supporters on social media do. And she seems to just have, you know, over and over again tried to, you know, she bought tickets to his golf tournaments, she was trying to put herself in his orbit. And I don't think it's actually quite clear when they

first really met, but at one point it seemed to work when she started appearing next to him in the next last couple of years. So at one point she appeared in a video with him at Bedminster at his golf course in New Jersey. Hey everybody, we're here at Bedminster. I'm with the greatest president ever, President Donald Trump. And he, you know, does that Trump thing

where he says, you know, she's a great person. Great to have you, and you've been really very special, and you work hard. She loves me, she's so complimentary towards me. You are a very opinionated lady, I have to tell you that, and in my opinion, I like that.

And you know, he seemed to be aware that she was pretty fringe even for some of the people who sometimes tend to be in his orbit when it comes to the far right. But he still seemed willing to let her in. And then she increasingly appeared around him during the last election. Laura Loomer seems to have a thing with President Trump and loyalty. Can you just talk a bit about how she seems to be pegging people as loyal or disloyal to the president and how long that's gone on for? So that's one of the really interesting things about her as a character is that she's quite transparent in many ways. On social media, she posts these very long rants,

especially now that you're allowed to basically go on forever. And she kind of seems to be very stream of consciousness. And she will just say very bluntly, she said this again a few days ago, she very bluntly will say, I know better than anyone else who is actually loyal to President Trump and to his agenda and who is kind of a poser

or who is kind of a deep state enemy. The thing that I harped on the most during the campaign season was the importance of vetting, vetting, vetting. I thought that we were keeping a binder full of receipts. And she says that she's vetting these people. And this kind of became a thing of hers during the last election.

She said she was vetting who was the most MAGA of them all, right? You know, she was going into their employment histories, all of their previous statements, things they had liked, people they'd interacted with. As far as I can tell, it's basically just using Google and Twitter the way most of us would do. She doesn't seem to be going much deeper, but she's kind of refashioned herself as somebody who's vetting people around the president and warning him if she thinks someone's not on his side. And she tends to post quote unquote receipts all over the internet

when she finds these people. The provocateur right, which she's a part of, is full of conspiracists and coconuts and etc. Where does she fit in? She definitely falls on the fringiest of the fringe, I would say. And you can tell because you've had a lot of people who themselves have been labeled as fringe, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and some others who say that she's crazy and who say that they are kind of on the more conservative end. Her rhetoric and her tone does not match the base, does not match MAGA, does not match my Republicans I know. And I am completely denouncing it. I'm over it. And I would encourage

anyone else that matches her statements to stop. And you know, she said she was being unfairly targeted because she was a conservative. But because she has this, she likes to be kind of offensive and, you know, really speak in pretty shocking terms about conspiracies. You know, 9-11 was an inside job. Kind of trading these kind of things back and forth. She's, you know, she's relegated to the very fringes because it's not only things that are necessarily related to President Trump, it's a particular worldview that she's really not shy about putting all over the internet. So last week Laura Loomer got herself an audience with President Trump.

They met at the White House. And you've done the kind of TikTok reporting on this. What happened? I think what's important to remember is that it would have made headlines even if she had just sat with him in the Oval Office. That would have been shocking enough for a lot of people. That someone like her, who again is pretty toxic, even in the far right circles, would have made her way into the Oval Office and gotten a sit down with President Trump. But on top of that, we find out that she walked in with a folder with over a dozen people.

She said we're part of the administration that weren't loyal enough to him, that we're somehow enough to him, that were somehow enemies to his agenda. And after she walked out, some of them were fired. President Trump's firing of the head of the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command has rattled lawmakers and conspiracy theorist Laura Loomers thanking President Trump for being receptive to her report of disloyal people in a national security agency.

The head of the NSA and his deputy and some other national security officials suddenly were gone. And she has taken credit for it. You know, she's been saying, you know, pretty not suddenly, she's been kind of taking credit for having raised these people to the president's attention. Yeah, she actually went in, I was told, to the West Wing with a list of around a dozen names and urged President Donald Trump to fire them. A lot of this was more about loitering.

Loomers' recommendations to Trump go across the government, expand across various different government agencies, including the State Department and intelligence agencies. The White House hasn't confirmed that it was directly connected, but you know, it seems pretty obvious that something happened there. Vera Bergengruen of The Wall Street Journal coming up, who's Laura Loomer's next target? And is it you?

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President Trump fired several national security officials last week, but the firing that got the most attention was the head of the NSA and of US Cyber Command. So the head of the NSA was an Air Force general called Timothy Hawk. And he and his deputy were not people who were prone to go after Trump online or have any public statements where they're necessarily, you know, opposing him by any means. Her problem seems to have been that he had been in previous administrations and that he was some kind of deep state official who was opposing, you know, Trump's agenda. We have now found ourselves as a part of the team that's defending our electoral process

because of our adversary's intent to target it from a cyber perspective and information. How we counter disinformation together is a national effort. And she had kind of flagged him on Twitter and called him a traitor. As a Biden appointee, General Hawk had no place serving in the Trump administration, given that he was handpicked by General Milley, who was accused of committing treason by President Trump. Why would we want an NSA director who is referred to Biden after being hand selected by Milley, who told China he would side with them over Trump?

This is part of a longstanding suspicion among among a lot of Trump supporters that people within the government are working against him and trying to make it harder for him to get his goals done. So these two people, again, career officials, not exactly well-known names or flashy people, and they were just gone after she met with President Trump. Someone is running the NSA now though. Yes, they have an acting director now. Gotcha. Okay, so the question is, President Trump likes people who are loyal to him, for sure.

But really, one wonders how on earth could Laura Loomer have enough influence to get the president, her claim, to fire people in his national security agency? I'm sure there's a lot of people in Trump's own inner circle who are wondering that because there's no lack of people who are being kind of flagged as people who should be fired, right? We had SignalGage, we had, you know, war chats, we've had so many things in the last couple of weeks. And it was pretty surprising to have someone like Laura Loomer come in, and again, apparently have the kind of influence to get someone fired who wasn't exactly on most people's radar.

And another thing to remember is that she had tried to get hired by the Trump campaign, and a lot of people around him, including Suzy Wiles who's now his chief of staff, you know, people in this campaign thought that was a really bad idea and made sure to freeze her out. And she still seems to always warm her way back in because Trump likes people like her. Trump likes people who are offensive and brash and really supportive of him. And so he tends to call her, you know, a wonderful person. Laura, how are you? You look so beautiful as always. He thinks that his base likes her and that she says a lot of things publicly that he

can say, right? There's a big jump between that. And as I said, having someone even come into the White House and then having the discussion at the White House be, you know, who should get fired by this 31-year-old online influencer. Does Laura Loomer have either an official or unofficial position in the Trump White House? Not that we know of, but we know that she really, really wants one. She's been very blunt, almost begging. I mean, it's not subtle.

On Twitter every couple of days, how badly she wants to be quote-unquote vetting people. And what we do know is that she tried to get hired by the transition. Once Trump won the election, they were hiring all these people for his new administration, and she kind of saw her opening and tried to promote herself as someone who could be doing this quote-unquote vetting. And again, she's tried to establish this reputation. She knows she also calls herself a journalist. That's kind of important to remember. She she tends to put a lot of screenshots on Twitter. They're all highlighted. I use a very non-traditional form of journalism in order to raise awareness about issues. Gorilla journalism, very aggressive in your face tactics. I, you. I certainly don't break the law.

Why did Laura Loomer set her sights on the NSA? Of all the agencies she could have taken a look at, Doge is going hard after just about everything in Washington. Why did she pick on the NSA? I mean, everyone had thought that when Elon Musk walked into the NSA with his Doge guys, that was game over, there was NSA with his Doge guys,

that was game over, there was going to be some huge problem, mass layoffs, and they left and nothing major happened. No one could really have imagined that it would be Laura Loomer, of all people, this person that I'm sure most of them have never heard of, who would actually get the head of their agency fired. But it's unclear whether she specifically had her sights on these people for any particular reason or because they were more high profile. You know, again, it's important to remember just the level of distrust that intelligence agencies hold, you know,

in the imagination of the MAGA faithful as people who are working from within the government, who have all, you know, have all this information. And in their view, since the first administration, we're trying to work against President Trump. And there's just a lot of distrust when it comes to that. The NSA keeps a rather low profile. What kinds of threats to the country does it work on? What's its job? The NSA is in charge of just as a broad portfolio.

It works obviously on cybersecurity. It collects a lot of intelligence, foreign communications, and it's a national security agency that provides all of this in order to, you know, to the president and to share with other agencies in order to make national security decisions. And you know, it's been in the crosshairs in recent years, you know, for collecting information on Americans, it's always been kind of seen as this potentially creepy, eavesdropping agency. So ever since the Edward Snowden days. NSA and the intelligence community in general is focused on getting intelligence wherever

it can by any means possible. Now increasingly we see that it's happening domestically. So, you know, that's probably part of the reason that it has this association in Americans' minds. But again, for the people on President Trump, they have so much distrust of intelligence agencies, of intelligence officials who they think are spying on the president, trying to get him. They were spying on President Trump's campaign. Spying on not only the President Trump's campaign, looks like spying on the president, trying to get him. They were spying on President Trump's campaign. Spying on not only the President Trump's campaign, looks like spying on him during the transition period and potentially even while he was president

of the United States. Ultimately, it's an agency that's responsible for intelligence gathering and sharing with foreign allies. And, you know, there's really no reason that someone like Laura Loomer, again, would know whether someone would be a traitor to the president, what that would look like. Does the firing of these officials at the NSA, does it leave the United States more vulnerable to attacks, to cyber attacks, for example?

Yes and no. It's not an agency that necessarily stops working when something like this happens. But of course, you know, you remove the head of the agency and his deputy very abruptly. That's a lot of experience and institutional knowledge that leaves. But really it's the uncertainty that this creates and again, the fear in many senses that they could be next, that this is just a very destabilizing move to do. It also raises the question of who could be bringing other people to someone like Loomer's attention, who feels like they can push certain people out.

There could be a lot of, there could be either foreign adversaries or others who maybe consider Loomer a valuable person to raise these people to. And just in general, the fact that this could be enough that claiming that you are not fully loyal to the president, and that definition tends to vary day by day, is enough to push out such a high-level agency head is destabilizing on its own, even though the agency of course will continue doing its job. Vera, you're kind of the perfect person to talk to on this story because you are a national

security reporter, but you also spent many years looking into right-wing figures on the internet, including Laura Loomer, which means you didn't just learn about her last week, like many people. Now that she has pulled this off, this is an enormous thing that Laura Loomer has managed to do. Do we know anything about what she will ask President Trump to do next or who she might target next? She seems to have set her sights on Earl Matthews next, who's Trump's nominee to be the Pentagon's top lawyer. And she seems to be taking issue with the fact that he was responsible, or

she says he was responsible, for getting Hexeth blocked from working at Biden's inauguration because of some tattoos he has which are tied to extremist movements. And apparently they saw them, they told him he couldn't work the inauguration because at that time they were being very careful with anyone associated with extremist symbols. But she seems to have taken real issue with him. and whereas in the past she used to go after people every single day on Twitter and no one seemed to pay attention, now everyone's really worried whenever she brings anyone up. The other noteworthy thing is that unlike the other people who Laura Loomer basically got fired, who haven't said anything, Earl Matthews posted a long response on Twitter where he kind of seemed

to imply that somebody was putting her up to this. He said, you know, you have to ask yourself who benefits from this. It's clear she thinks that this is working and she has started her own vetting agency, that those are her words, called LUMRD strategies. And she set up a Twitter account, which didn't really have almost any followers before the NSA news, which now seems to have gotten quite a bit of pickup. We don't really know who her clients are,

but she has a pretty prominent endorsement from President Trump himself, who says, if you're LUMRD, you're in deep trouble. That's the end of your career, in a sense. As if that's a verb and it's something that she can do, which basically means investigating someone and getting them fired from their job. What I think is pretty clear, that a lot more people in Washington are going to be very closely watching Laura Lumer's Twitter feed to see who she mentions next, because they don't want to be on the

end of that. And it's clear that she's got the power to get people fired or get their nominations scuttled. And I think we're going to be seeing a lot more of that. Vera Bergengruen is a national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal, wsj.com. Gabrielle Burbae and Victoria Chamberlain produced today's show Miranda Kennedy edited. Andrea Christens' daughter and Patrick Boyd engineered and Amanda Llewellyn checked the facts. The rest of us, Hadi Mouagdi, Peter Balanon-Rosen, Miles Bryan, Avashai Artsy, Jolie Meyers, Devin Schwartz, Sean Rommesfirm, Carla Javier, Amina El-Sadi and Laura Bullard. Today Explained is distributed by WNYC. The

show is a part of Vox. You can support our journalism by joining our membership program today. In this economy? Yeah, if you can. It's optional. Go to Vox.com slash members to sign up. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you