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--:-- Noel King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noel King.
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--:-- Noel King: 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?
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--:-- Noel King: Laura Loomer, chaos agent, activist, proud Islamophobe, her words, influencer, trickster, trespasser. I'm just really confused. You're on private property, so you're trespassing.
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--:-- Noel King: Nancy said everyone was left in here. Did you know who Nancy Pelosi is?
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--:-- Noel King: Yes, ma'am. She has Trump's ear, maybe even his respect. You don't want to be lumered. If you're lumered, you're in deep trouble.
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--:-- Noel King: And she's just getting started in Washington. That's ahead on Today Explained.
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--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from BetterHelp. Let me tell you a true story. Last weekend, I got an email from a listener who wanted to discuss their problems with me. And I said, look, I don't think that this is about me personally. At least I hope it's not.
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--:-- Noel King: Why don't you try BetterHelp.com slash Explained? Absolute truth. As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise.
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--:-- Noel King: Find the one with BetterHelp. The one is not me, guys. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash explain. That's BetterHelp.com slash explain.
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--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
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--:-- Noel King: And some of the best reporting I've seen on Laura Loomer comes from The Wall Street Journal's Vera Bergengruen.
--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Laura Loomer is a far-right Internet personality. She kind of defies characterization, to be honest.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: I am the most censored person in this country, hands down, if not the most censored woman in the world.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She's only 31, which seems to surprise a lot of people because, you know, she's been around for a long time.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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 disloyal to President Trump.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: An honor student at Berry University told instructors she wanted to start that group to help promote education in the Islamic State.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: But she was working undercover for a nonprofit. Project Veritas alleges the school is sympathetic to the terror group ISIS.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And they argue a secretly recorded video taken by a student proves it.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Laura Loomer is like, she's like a prankster.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Tell us about some of the pranks. Exactly.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And it's clear she's always been this way. She's not someone who necessarily picked it up recently once these things became popular, right?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: James O'Keefe with Project Veritas. You're on camera here talking about giving anal sex toys and butt plugs to little children.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Sir, why are you running? Why are you running away?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: But she basically loves to do these very public things that she films on video.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: For example, she tried to vote wearing a burqa under the name of Huba Abedin, who was Hillary Clinton's aide in 2016 to make a point about voter fraud.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And these things always push very much towards offensive and towards, you know, just really attention calling.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Why are you supporting the weaponization of government against President Trump?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: My name's Laura Loomer. Oh gosh, you're the crazy person.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: I'm the crazy person. I think you're the crazy person supporting the weaponization of government against Donald Trump.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: You don't need to run for president, fat ass. You need to get on a treadmill
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She disrupted a production of Julius Caesar in 2017 in Central Park.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Because they were trying to make, you know, they were being satirical about Trump and she didn't like that.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: The bastardization of Shakespeare, really.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She's changed herself to, you know, the doors of Twitter's headquarters.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: My name is Laura Loomer. I'm a conservative investigative journalist.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And today I'm here at Twitter. And on this side, that's the tweet that I was permanently banned for.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She's appeared at politicians' homes.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And all of this is just always recorded and promoted and posted on social media.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And none of it's ever quite cohesive.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: It's not always necessarily very smart, But it's very attention calling because she knows she's trying to make a point.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: How did Laura Loomer and President Trump actually meet?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: So apparently, you know, she was always a huge Trump fan.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And she at some point just must have gotten onto his radar, as sometimes his very vocal supporters on social media do.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And she seems to just have, you know, over and over again tried to, you know, she bought tickets to his golf tournaments.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She was trying to put herself in his orbit.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And I don't think it's actually quite clear when they first really met.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: But at one point it seemed to work when she started appearing next to him in the last couple of years
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: So at one point she appeared in a video with him at Bedminster at his golf course in New Jersey
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Hey everybody we here at Bedminster I with the greatest president ever President Donald Trump.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And he, you know, does the Trump thing where he says, you know, she's a great person.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Great to have you. And you've been really very special.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: You love me. She's so complimentary towards me.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: You are a very opinionated lady.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: I have to tell you that.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And in my opinion, I like that.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: But he still seemed willing to let her in.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And then she increasingly appeared around him during the last election.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Laura Loomer seems to have a thing with President Trump and loyalty.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: So that's one of the really interesting things about her as a character is that she's quite transparent in many ways.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: On social media, she posts these very long rants, especially now that you're allowed to, you know, basically go on forever.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And she kind of seems to be very stream of consciousness.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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 into his agenda and who is kind of a poser or who is kind of a deep state enemy.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: The thing that I harped on the most during the campaign season was, you know, the importance of vetting, vetting, vetting.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: I thought that we were keeping a binder full of receipts.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And she says that she's vetting these people.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And this kind of became a thing of hers during the last election.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She said she was vetting, you know, who was the most MAGA of them all, right?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: You know, she was going into their employment histories, all of their previous statements, things they had liked, people they'd interacted with.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: As far as I can tell, it's basically just using Google and Twitter the way most of us would do.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She doesn't seem to be going much deeper.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: But she's kind of refashioned herself as somebody who's vetting people around the president and warning him if she thinks someone's, you know, not on his side.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And she tends to, you know, post quote-unquote receipts all over the Internet when she finds these people.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: The provocateur right, which she's a part of, is full of conspiracists and coconuts and etc.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Where does she fit in?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She definitely falls on the fringiest of the fringe, I would say.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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, you know, they are kind of on the more conservative end.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Her rhetoric and her tone does not match the base, does not match MAGA, does not match most Republicans, I know.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: I am completely denouncing it. I'm over it.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And I would encourage anyone else that matches her statements to stop.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And, you know, she said she was being unfairly targeted because she was a conservative.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: But because she has this, she likes to be kind of offensive and, you know, really speak in pretty shocking terms about conspiracies.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: You know, 9-11 was an inside job, kind of trading these kind of things back and forth.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She's, you know, she's relegated to the very fringes because it's not only things that are necessarily related to President Trump.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: It's a particular worldview that that she's really not shy about putting all over the Internet.
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--:-- Noel King: So last week, Laura Loomer got herself an audience with President Trump.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: They met at the White House.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And you've done the kind of TikTok reporting on this.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: What happened?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: That would have been shocking enough for a lot of people.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: But on top of that, we find out that she walked in with a folder with over a dozen people.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She said were part of the administration that weren't loyal enough to him, that were somehow enemies to his agenda.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And after she walked out, some of them were fired.
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--:-- Noel King: President Trump's firing of the head of the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command has rattled lawmakers.
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--:-- Noel King: And conspiracy theorist Laura Loomers thanking President Trump for being receptive to her report of disloyal people in a national security agency.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: The head of the NSA and his deputy and some other national security officials suddenly were gone.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And she has taken credit for it.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: You know, she's been saying, you know, pretty not subtly.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She's been kind of taking credit for having raised these people to the president's attention.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: A lot of this was more about lawyers.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Loomer's recommendations to Trump go across the government, expand across various different government agencies, including the State Department and intelligence agencies.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: The White House hasn't confirmed that it was directly connected, but, you know, it seems pretty obvious that something happened there.
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--:-- Noel King: Coming up, who's Laura Loomer's next target?
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--:-- Noel King: And is it you? JK, JK, JK.
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--:-- Noel King: We'll be back in a minute.
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--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards.
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--:-- Noel King: Support for the show today comes from LifeKit, the podcast from NPR.
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--:-- Noel King: What's in your LifeKit?
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--:-- Noel King: Every day you have to make choices that might shape the direction of your life, but you can't flip to the back of the book to find an answer key.
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--:-- Noel King: Instead, you can listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
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--:-- Noel King: It's a podcast from NPR.
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--:-- Noel King: You're listening to Today Explained.
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--:-- Noel King: We're back with Vera Bergen-Gruen.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She's a national security reporter for The Wall Street Journal.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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 U.S. Cyber Command.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: So the head of the NSA was an Air Force general called Timothy Hawk.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: How we counter disinformation together is a national effort.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And she had kind of flagged him on Twitter and called him a traitor.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: As a Biden appointee, General Haack 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: This is part of a longstanding suspicion among a lot of, you know, 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: So these two people, again, career officials, not exactly well-known names or flashy people.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And they were just gone after she met with President Trump.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Someone is running the NSA now, though.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Yes, they have an acting director now.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Gotcha.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: OK, so the question is, President Trump likes people who are loyal to him.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: For sure.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: We had signal gauge. We had, you know, war chats. We've had so many things in the last couple of weeks.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And another thing to remember is that she had tried to get hired by the Trump campaign.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And a lot of people around him, including Susie 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And she still seems to always worm her way back in because Trump likes people like her.
--:-- [Soft music continues]
--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Trump likes people who are offensive and brash and really supportive of him.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And so he tends to call her, you know, a wonderful person.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Laura, how are you? You look so beautiful as always.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: He thinks that his base likes her and that she says a lot of things publicly that he can say, right?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Does Laura Loomer have either an official or unofficial position in the Trump White House?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Not that we know of, but we know that she really, really wants one.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She's been very blunt, almost begging.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: I mean, it's not subtle.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: On Twitter, every couple of days, how badly she wants to be, quote unquote, vetting people.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Vetting, vetting, vetting.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And what we do know is that she tried to get hired by the transition.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Once Trump won the election, they were hiring all these people for his new administration.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And she kind of saw her opening and tried to promote herself as someone who could be doing this, quote unquote, vetting.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And again, she's tried to establish this reputation.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And, you know, she also calls herself a journalist.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: That's kind of important to remember.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She tends to put a lot of screenshots on Twitter.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: They're all highlighted.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: I use a very non-traditional form of journalism in order to raise awareness about issues.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Guerrilla journalism, very aggressive in your face tactics.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: I, you know, certainly don't break the law.
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--:-- Noel King: Why did Laura Loomer set her sights on the NSA?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Of all the agencies she could have taken a look at, Doge is going hard after just about everything in Washington.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Why did she pick on the NSA?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: I mean, everyone had thought that when Elon Musk walked into the NSA with his Doge guys, you know, that was game over.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: There was going to be some huge problem, mass layoffs.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And, you know, they left and nothing major happened.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: But you know it unclear whether she specifically had her sights on these people for any particular reason or because they were more high-profile.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: You know again it 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And in their view, since the first administration, we're trying to, you know, work against President Trump.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And there's just a lot of distrust when it comes to that.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: The NSA keeps a rather low profile.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: What kinds of threats to the country does it work on?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: What's its job?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: So the NSA is in charge of just as a broad portfolio.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: It works obviously on cybersecurity.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: It collects a lot of intelligence, foreign communications.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And it's a national security agency that provides all of this in order to, you know, to the president and to shares with other agencies in order to make national security decisions.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And, you know, it's been in the crosshairs in recent years, you know, for collecting information on Americans.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: It's always been kind of seen as this potentially creepy eavesdropping agency.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: So, you know, ever since the Edward Snowden days.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: NSA and the intelligence community in general is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can, by any means possible.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Now, increasingly, we see that it's happening domestically.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: So, you know, that's probably part of the reason that it has this association in Americans' minds.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Ultimately, it's an agency that's responsible for intelligence gathering and sharing with foreign allies.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Does the firing of these officials at the NSA, does it leave the United States more vulnerable to attacks, to cyber attacks, for example?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Yes and no.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: It's not an agency that necessarily stops working when something like this happens.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: But of course, you know, you remove the head of the agency and his deputy very abruptly.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: That's a lot of experience and institutional knowledge that leaves.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: But really, it's the uncertainty that this creates and the again, the fear in many senses that they could be next, that, you know, that this is just a very destabilizing move to do.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: It also, you know, raises the question of who could be bringing other people to someone like Loomer's attention, who feels like they can, you know, push certain people out.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: There could be a lot of, you know, there could be either foreign adversaries or others who maybe consider Loomer a valuable person to raise these people to.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Noel King: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Now that she has pulled this off, this is an enormous thing that Laura Loomer has managed to do.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Do we know anything about what she will ask President Trump to do next or who she might target next?
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: She seems to have set her sights on Earl Matthews next, who's Trump's nominee to be the Pentagon's top lawyer.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And apparently they saw them.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: They told him he couldn't work the inauguration because at that time they were being very careful with anyone associated with extremist symbols.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: But she seems to have taken real issue with him.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And whereas in the past, she used to go after people every single day on Twitter and no one seemed to pay attention.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: Now everyone's really worried whenever she brings anyone up.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: He said, you know, you have to ask yourself who benefits from this.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: It's clear she thinks that this is working.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And she has started her own vetting agency that those are her words called Loomerd Strategies.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: And, you know, 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.
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--:-- Vera Bergengruen: We don't really know who her clients are, but she has a pretty prominent endorsement from President Trump himself, who
