Loomer urged Trump to remove NSA director and others across multiple agencies: Sources
Julia Beverly/Getty Images
(WASHINGTON) — The director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Timothy Haugh, was among the numerous officials far-right activist Laura Loomer urged President Donald Trump to remove during her official Oval Office meeting earlier this week, citing evidence of disloyalties, multiple sources tell ABC News.
In her Oval Office meeting, Loomer presented the president with printed files of research she compiled on various government officials — not only from the NSA and National Security Council, but also from other federal agencies, including the State Department, sources said. She urged the president to take action against those she claimed were disloyal or were appointed during former President Joe Biden’s administration, the sources added.
Haugh, who is the director of the NSA and also heads U.S. Cyber Command, and his civilian deputy Wendy Noble, were both removed from their positions, according to a U.S. official. Their firings came after Loomer’s meeting with the president on Wednesday.
Loomer appeared to confirm her involvement in a post on X, writing, “NSA Director Tim Haugh and his deputy Wendy Noble have been disloyal to President Trump. That is why they have been fired … Thank you President Trump for being receptive to the vetting materials provided to you and thank you for firing these Biden holdovers.”
Trump on Thursday acknowledged that Loomer has made recommendations to him and that he sometimes listens, but claimed that she was not involved in the NSC firings following their meeting on Wednesday.
“So Laura Loomer is a very good patriot. She is a very strong person, and I saw her yesterday for a little while. She makes recommendations of things and people, and sometimes I listen to those recommendations, like I do with everybody. I listen to everybody, and then I make a decision,” Trump said.
In a separate post Thursday night, Loomer said she reported names of “disloyal people” in the NSC to Trump. On Friday, she wrote on X that she planned to release “more names of individuals who should not be in the Trump administration due to their questionable loyalty & past attacks on President Trump.”
Asked about these recent X posts from Loomer, the White House referred ABC News to Trump’s previous comments about her making recommendations.
Loomer’s involvement comes after weeks of both public and private pressure, sources said, as she raised concerns about the administration’s vetting process and the inclusion of officials she perceives as disloyal to the president.
Loomer has frequently spread misinformation. In July, she claimed in a social media post, without citing evidence, that President Joe Biden had a medical emergency after landing at Joint Base Andrews.
She had also started unsubstantiated claims about family members of Judge Juan Merchan in Trump’s New York hush money case, including that his daughter posted a fake photo of Trump in jail on social media, which the court has denied. It prompted Trump to share Loomer’s posts and spread the rumors.
(WASHINGTON) — The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent agency formed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis to safeguard Americans against unfair business practices, is the newest target of Elon Musk and the Trump administration.
The agency is at a virtual standstill after Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and Russell Vought, the leader of the White House budget office and now acting director of the CFPB, took control.
They and congressional Republicans have accused the agency of overreach and not being politically accountable.
Internal emails obtained by ABC News show Vought advised the agency’s headquarters in Washington will be closed all week and told employees, “Please do not perform any work tasks.”
In a post on X Saturday night, Vought said the CFPB’s funding, which comes through the Federal Reserve, is “now being turned off.”
Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who helped create the CFBP, posted a video on Monday “ringing the alarm bell” on what the impact will be if its gutted.
Warren highlighted what she said the agency does for average Americans, including finding fraud in payment apps, stepping in if a bank tries to repossess your car and working to cut credit card fees. She argued that only Congress can dismantle the CFPB, and that Trump and Musk do not have the authority to do so unilaterally.
“So, why are these two guys trying to gut the CFPB? It’s not rocket science: Trump campaigned on helping working people, but now that he’s in charge, this is the payoff to the rich guys who invested in his campaign and who want to cheat families — and not have anybody around to stop them. Yeah, it’s another scam,” she said.
Congressional Democrats and others protested outside the agency on Monday afternoon.
Here is what to know about the agency and its work.
What is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau?
The CFPB is an independent agency established by Congress after the 2008 financial crisis under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It’s a consumer watchdog aimed at protecting American households from unfair and deceptive practices across the financial services industry.
Its oversight applies to everything from mortgages to credit cards to bank fees to student loans. By law, the CFPB has the rare ability to issue new rules — and impose fines against companies who break them.
Since its establishment in 2011, the CFPB says it has clawed back $20.7 billion for American consumers.
Unlike many federal agencies that are beholden to appropriations battles in Congress, the CFPB’s funding comes through the Federal Reserve system. This has made it a frequent target by Republicans and industry groups. Last summer, the Supreme Court ruled the CFPB’s source of funding is constitutional.
Key actions under the Biden administration
Under the Biden administration, the CFPB took aggressive steps to take on big players in the banking and financial services industries — issuing regulations that aimed to put money back in the pockets of tens of millions of Americans.
In December, it finalized a rule that would cap most bank overdraft fees at $5 (right now those fees can be as high as $35 per transaction). The agency said that would save the typical household $225 per year, or about $5 billion in total. That rule was set to take effect October 1, 2025 — but its fate is now in limbo given the work stoppage order from acting director Vought.
The CFPB also finalized a rule in January that would wipe medical debt from Americans’ credit reports. The agency estimated that would affect roughly 15 million Americans with $49 billion in unpaid medical bills on their credit reports. The change, set to take effect in March, is currently on hold as it faces legal challenges. A similar rule capping credit card late fees is also in legal limbo.
Beyond issuing new rules, the CFPB also addresses direct complaints from consumers who might have been scammed on everything from credit cards to cryptocurrency to car loans.
Overseeing mortgages and banks
The 2008 recession exposed how many Americans were left vulnerable in the unregulated subprime mortgage market. One of the key goals of the CFPB was to oversee the “nonbank mortgage market.” In other words, this applies to homebuyers who take out mortgages through independent lenders that aren’t banks.
According to the CFPB, nonbank lenders account for 65% of all mortgages in the U.S. in a market worth $13 trillion.
In practice, what this means is that the CFPB monitors and keeps tabs on nonbank lenders to try to ensure they aren’t deceiving or ripping off customers.
The agency also supervises banks and credit unions holding more than $10 billion in assets, accounting for more than 80% of the banking industry’s total assets. This includes banks like JPMorgan, Citigroup and Bank of America. Other federal agencies like the Fed, FDIC and Office of the Comptroller also regulate banks.
(WASHINGTON) — A federal judge appears poised to block the Trump administration if the Department of Defense attempts to place limitations on or ban transgender service members.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes is still hearing arguments Tuesday in the case but signaled deep skepticism with the claim that transgender service members lessen the military’s lethality or readiness.
“You and I both agree that the greatest fighting force that world history has ever seen is not going to be impacted in any way by less than 1% of the soldiers using a different pronoun than others might want to call them. Would you agree with that?” Judge Reyes asked during a hearing this morning.
“No, Your Honor, I’m not. I can’t agree with that,” a lawyer for the Department of Justice responded.
At issue is Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order that directed the DOD to update its guidance “regarding trans-identifying medical standards for military service and to rescind guidance inconsistent with military readiness.” While the Department of Defense has not issued final guidance on transgender service members, the order led to a pause in gender affirming care for service members and is expected to lead to a significant curtailment of transgender service members based on “readiness and lethality.”
With the DOD policy expected to be finalized over the coming week, Reyes said she would hold off on issuing an order but had largely made up her mind about the legality of the order, at one point remarking that “smarter people on the D.C. Circuit would have to tell me I’m wrong” about the policy. She added that the central premise of the executive order — that only two genders exist — is “not biologically correct.”
Reyes also raised concerns about the wording of the executive order, which she criticized for being intentionally imprecise and a pretext for a ban on transgender soldiers.
“If we had President Trump here right now, and I said to him, ‘Is this a transgender ban?’ What do you think he would say?” Reyes asked.
“I have no idea, Your Honor,” said DOJ attorney Jason Lynch.
“I do. He would say, ‘Of course it is.’ Because he calls it a transgender ban, because all the language in it is indicative,” Reyes said.
The judge — who began the hearing by noting that every service member regardless of their gender ideology “deserves our gratitude” — also spent a portion of the hearing questioning Lynch about the group of transgender soldiers who filed the lawsuit.
“If you were in a foxhole, you wouldn’t care about these individuals’ gender ideology, right? You would just be happy that someone with that experience and that bravery and that honorable service to the country was sitting right next to you. Right?” Reyes asked.
“Don’t want to testify as a witness, Your Honor, or offer my personal views of hypothetical,” Lynch responded before conceding, “If I were in a foxhole, I doubt that the gender identity would be a primary concern.”
Reyes also pushed the lawyer for the Department of Justice — who she later commended for arguing his case well — to admit that the transgender soldiers made the country “safer.”
“Are they honorable, truthful, and disciplined?” Reyes asked. “As far as I know, among them, they have over 60 years of military service.”
“That’s correct,” Lynch said.
“And you would agree that together, the plaintiffs have made America safer?” Reyes asked.
(WASHINGTON) — As Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the FBI, appears Thursday for his Senate confirmation hearing, some of the rhetoric he has espoused for years to defend Trump and promote Trump’s reelection is sure to elicit sharp questions about whether he is fit to lead one of the nation’s premiere law enforcement agencies.
Patel has derided the FBI as the “Federal Bureau of Insanity.” He’s announced “a mission to annihilate the ‘Deep State'” — what he calls a “cabal of unelected tyrants” inside government, undermining Trump. He’s said the conspiracy theory QAnon, claiming a secret global plot to traffic children and take down Trump, is right in many ways and “should get credit for all the things” it has accomplished. And he once promised to “come after” and prosecute “the conspirators not just in government, but in the media” who “helped Joe Biden rig the presidential election.”
On a podcast two years ago, Trump adviser Roger Stone told Patel his critics are right about one thing: “You are a Trump loyalist.”
Patel chuckled and nodded affirmatively.
But that’s just what Democrats — and even some Republicans — on the Senate Judiciary Committee may wonder about most: If confirmed, is Patel so loyal to Trump that he would use the FBI to push Trump’s political agenda and target Trump’s perceived enemies?
‘An existential threat’
According to Patel, the FBI has already become a political weapon — especially with its multiple investigations of Trump, including the unprecedented search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022 — and that’s what he wants to change.
“The rot at the core of the FBI isn’t just scandalous, it’s an existential threat to our republican form of government,” Patel wrote in his book, published two years ago, titled “Government Gangsters.”
Trump, on social media, called Patel’s book “the roadmap to end the Deep State’s reign” when it came out.
Many of Trump’s allies in Congress have lauded Patel’s nomination, touting him as the change agent needed at the top of an embattled agency. Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has called Patel’s career “a study in fighting for unpopular but righteous causes, exposing corruption, and putting America First.”
Democrats, however, not only point to what they see as Patel’s concerning rhetoric — but also what they’ve described as his relative lack of experience for such a significant position.
After meeting with Patel last week, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said he has “grave concerns” about Patel’s nomination, declaring, “Mr. Patel has neither the experience, the temperament, nor the judgment to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
‘I just got to my breaking point’
Now in his mid-40s, Patel grew up on New York’s Long Island, ultimately deciding to attend law school after caddying for a group of criminal defense attorneys at the Garden City County Club. By his own account, in 2005, he graduated from Pace University Law school in the bottom third of his class — something he was “very proud of,” he once joked.
After law school, he spent nine years as a public defender, and in late 2013 he moved to Washington, D.C., to join the Justice Department’s National Security Division as a terrorism prosecutor, helping U.S. attorneys’ offices around the country prosecute their cases.
He was involved in Justice Department cases all over the world, including ones stemming from the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi and the 2010 World Cup bombings in Uganda.
But in his book and in media interviews, he said he grew frustrated with his time at the Justice Department, especially after a dust-up with a federal judge that made national headlines.
In early 2016, while Patel was in Tajikistan for work, the judge presiding over one of his cases in Texas called for an in-person hearing back in the United States. Patel didn’t have a suit or tie with him in Tajikistan, and after racing halfway around the world to make the hearing, the judge badgered him to “dress like a lawyer” and “act like a lawyer,” according to a transcript of the exchange.
“You don’t add a bit of value, do you?” the judge added.
As Patel recounted in his book, his bosses at the Justice Department privately expressed support for him, but when the Washington Post wrote a story about it two weeks later, the Justice Department, in Patel’s telling, refused to defend him publicly, so the newspaper “dragged my name through the mud.”
Patel has also described how he grew upset over the Justice Department’s handling of the Benghazi case following the 2012 attack by Islamic militants, believing that “terrorists went free” despite his disputed assertion that the Obama administration had enough evidence to charge even more people for the attack.
“I just got to my breaking point,” Patel once recalled. So in 2017, he left the Justice Department to become a senior investigator on Capitol Hill, where he helped lead the House Republicans’ probe of “Russiagate” — which, as he describes it, exposed FBI wrongdoing in its 2016 investigation of alleged ties between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia.
‘Not a credible witness’
Patel’s work on the Russia probe led to him joining the Trump administration in 2019, and in the final year of Trump’s presidency he was appointed acting deputy director of national intelligence — the second-in-command of the entire U.S. intelligence community — and then chief of staff to the acting U.S. defense secretary, a position that critics claimed he was unqualified to hold even for just the 10 weeks he was there.
After Trump’s first administration ended, Patel regularly appeared on conservative media outlets, frequently praising Trump and criticizing the Justice Department for investigating and then prosecuting Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving office and his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Patel has claimed — despite the Justice Department’s inspector general finding otherwise — that the FBI played a part in pushing pro-Trump protesters to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And he has claimed in media interviews and court testimony that Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi deserve blame for the attack — not Trump — because, Patel insists, Trump days earlier had authorized up to 20,000 National Guard to secure the Capitol.
The judge who listened to his court testimony in a case about Trump’s eligibility to be on Colorado’s ballot in the November election ruled that Patel “was not a credible witness,” saying his testimony was “not only illogical” but “completely devoid of any evidence in the record.”
After Trump left office, Patel launched a tax-exempt charity, now known as the Kash Foundation, which made national headlines in 2023 with revelations that it provided thousands of dollars to at least two so-called “FBI whistleblowers” who helped House Republicans push disputed claims of corruption inside the Justice Department.
Patel has said his charity helps fund defamation lawsuits, supports whistleblowers, buys meals for families in need over Christmas, supports Jan. 6 families, and more recently funds “rescue operations” out of Israel.
But he has refused to offer specifics about who is benefiting from his charity, and, as ABC News previously reported, experts have questioned whether it was following the law. At the time, Patel declined to speak with ABC News about its reporting.
After Trump announced his latest presidential campaign, Patel traveled the country to promote Trump’s reelection, saying that Trump would fire “thousands and thousands and thousands” of government employees to root out the “Deep State.”
Three weeks after Trump was reelected president, he named Patel as his pick to lead the FBI.
