President Trump Fires National Security Agency Chief
The Director and the second ranking official at the US National Security Agency were dismissed from their roles on Thursday 3rd April. These firings are unprecedented, but this comes after multiple firings of key officials since the Trump administration took office in January.
It is unclear why Air Force General. Timothy Haugh and his deputy have been dismissed, although Laura Loomer, a self-described 'investigative journalist' and 'free spirit' has claimed credit for their dismissal in a social media post, following her meeting with Trump this week.
General Haugh was both the head of US Cyber Command and the director of the National Security Agency, a role he had served in since February 2024. Wendy Noble, the NSA’s Deputy Director, was the agency’s senior civilian leader.
"Thank you President Trump for being receptive to the vetting materials provided to you," Loomer wrote on a social media blog. "And thank you for firing these Biden holdovers." Loomer, has written that Haugh and Noble, "have been disloyal to President Trump. That is why they have been fired." Loomer said that because they were Biden appointees they could not be trusted.
Haugh and Noble are military officials who have worked under Republican and Democratic administrations. Haugh has spent more than 30 years in the Air Force, primarily in intelligence and cyber positions. Nobles joined the NSA in 1987 as a cryptologist.
Opposition Democrats have been swift to criticise President Trump for these dismissals.
- "I have known General Haugh to be an honest and forthright leader who followed the law and put national security first, I fear those are precisely the qualities that could lead to his firing in this administration," Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a statement.
- Senator Mark Warner,the Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said of Haugh's removal “It is astonishing that President Trump would fire the non-partisan, experienced leader of the NSA while still failing to hold any member of his team accountable for leaking classified information on a commercial messaging app, even as he apparently takes staffing direction on national security from a discredited conspiracy theorist in the Oval Office”.
- Larry Pfeiffer, a former senior intelligence official, called the dismissals “unprecedented.” “America should worry when the politicians want to control the guys with the world’s most powerful eavesdropping capability,” he said.
US Presidents have, in the past, customarily deferred to the advice of the Defense Secretary and the CIA Director on appointments to lead the NSA.
However, last month Trump confidant Elon Musk, cabinet member and head of the widely feared, Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), met Haugh at the National Security Agency. That visit came around a week after Musk said on his X post that "The NSA needs an overhaul."
Trump has fired at least three National Security Council officials since his second inauguration and has previously expressed dissatisfaction with various officials responsible for US national security..
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Image: Ideogram
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