WASHINGTON >> President Donald Trump said Thursday that he’s fired “some” White House National Security Council officials, a move that comes a day after far-right activist Laura Loomer raised concerns directly to him about staff loyalty.

Trump downplayed Loomer’s influence on the firings. But Loomer during her Oval Office conversation with Trump urged the president to purge staffers she deemed insufficiently loyal to his “Make America Great Again” agenda, according to several people familiar with the matter. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive personnel manner.

Loomer, who has floated the baseless conspiracy theory that the Sept. 11 attacks were an “inside job”, was one of Trump’s most vicious online enforcers during the 2024 campaign.

“Always we’re letting go of people,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One as he made his way to Miami on Thursday afternoon. “People that we don’t like or people that we don’t think can do the job or people that may have loyalties to somebody else.”Loomer appeared to take credit for the firings in a post late Thursday on X, writing, “You know how you know the NSC officials I reported to President Trump are disloyal people who have played a role in sabotaging Donald Trump?” She then noted that “the fired officials” were being defended by Trump critics on CNN and MSNBC.

The firings by Trump of NSC staff come at a tumultuous moment for Trump and his national security team. His national security adviser Mike Waltz, continues to fight back calls for his ouster after using the publicly available encrypted Signal app to discuss planning for the sensitive March 15 military operation targeting Houthi militants in Yemen.

Trump has said he stands by Waltz, who traveled to Florida with the president on Thursday.

Vice President JD Vance, chief of staff Susie Wiles, Waltz and Sergio Gor, director of the Presidential Personnel Office, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose brother died in the Sept. 11 attacks, also took part in the meeting with Loomer, the people said.

The Presidential Personnel Office has fired at least four senior NSC officials and multiple lower-ranking aides since Wednesday’s meeting with Loomer, according to the people familiar with the situation.

The NSC officials fired include Brian Walsh, a director for intelligence; Thomas Boodry, a senior director for legislative affairs; and David Feith, a senior director for technology and national security, and Maggie Dougherty, the senior director for international organizations.

Waltz was not fired, nor was one of Loomer’s top targets, deputy national security adviser Alex Wong. Apart from the firings, several other officials who had been detailed to the council were reassigned back to their home agencies over the weekend, before the White House meeting.

“Laura Loomer is a very good patriot. She is a very strong person,” said Trump, who described his talks with the far-right activist as “constructive.”

Trump acknowledged that Loomer “recommended certain people for jobs.”

“Sometimes I listen to those recommendations like I do with everybody,” Trump said. “I listen to everybody then I make a decision.”

Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican who sits on Senate committees overseeing the military and national intelligence, said it “raises eyebrows” when “there is a firing of people on the National Security Council or their staff, particularly people that we have respect for, who were part of the Intel community to begin with here in the Senate.”

Loomer has been speaking out on social media about members of Trump’s national security team that she insists can’t be trusted.

“It was an honor to meet with President Trump and present him with my research findings,” Loomer said in a Thursday posting on X. “I will continue working hard to support his agenda, and I will continue reiterating the importance of, and the necessity of STRONG VETTING, for the sake of protecting the President of the United States of America, and our national security.”

Loomer, in the leadup to Wednesday’s meeting with Trump, had complained to sympathetic administration officials that she had been excluded from the NSC vetting process as Waltz built his staff, according to one person familiar with the matter. She believes Waltz was too reliant in the process on “neocons” — shorthand for the more hawkish neoconservatives within the Republican Party — as well as what she perceived as “not-MAGA-enough” types, the person said.

Last week, Loomer 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 social media, 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, Michigan, who is Trump’s nominee to be the U.S. ambassador to Kuwait; and Katrina Fotovat, the head of the State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues.

This story includes information from the New York Times.