I Asked ChatGPT Who Runs the NSA. It Didn't Say 'Laura Loomer' – Substack
You’ve probably heard that AI hallucinates. It just makes stuff up and presents it as fact, like my 8-year-old son did when he told people he was disabled because he’s colorblind.
So I tested this by asking ChatGPT: “Who decides who runs the National Security Agency?”
It confidently replied: the Director of National Intelligence, the Secretary of Defense, and the Senate.
Wrong! It forgot the most important decision-maker: Laura Loomer.
If you don’t know who Laura Loomer is, congratulations on your mental health. She’s often described as a “far-right provocateur,” which is French for “professional jerk.”
Loomer is best known for her crude, racist, conspiracy-mongering posts and attention-seeking stunts, like wearing a sombrero for a protest at Gavin Newsom’s house, which earned her an arrest record. She’s been called many things—“Trump’s Rasputin” is one, “whack job” is another—but she prefers “journalist,” a title she now backs up with a freshly issued Pentagon press pass.
The 32-year-old Trump superfan sees herself as the president’s hall monitor, using social media and personal access to the White House to narc out the kids who say mean things about the teacher or admit they liked the previous one, who was a Democrat. In a normal school, the hall monitor decides who can go to the computer lab. In the Trump White House, the hall monitor decides who should run America’s code-breaking, quantum-computing, network-exploiting, phone-hacking, cyber-defending agency.
One of Loomer’s big accomplishments this year was getting NSA Director Lt. Gen. Timothy Haugh fired—or as she likes to put it, “Loomered.” Haugh’s crime should be obvious: the 33-year Air Force veteran allowed himself to be “HAND PICKED” by Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whom Trump despises. This made him extremely Loomerable.
Also Loomered was Haugh’s deputy, Wendy Noble, allegedly a “protégé” of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, whom Trump also despises.
Then Loomer Loomered Noble’s proposed replacement because he once donated $500 to a Democrat.
Oh, and the NSA general counsel’s office has been vacant since July, when the previous officeholder was Loomered for past work with the Democratic staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
The end result is that acting officials have been warming the chairs at the top of the NSA for eight months and counting. That’s eight months of Russia and China poking at America’s cyber defenses while the White House is paralyzed by a woman who spends 20 hours a day on social media. The interim director is probably wondering which decision will get him Loomered next.
“You don’t want to be Loomered,” Trump said. “If you’re Loomered, you’re in deep trouble. That’s the end of your career in a sense.”
But salvation may be at hand. The administration appears to have finally found someone to run the NSA: Lt. Gen. Joshua M. Rudd, deputy commander of Indo-Pacific Command and former Delta Force commander, which is French for “certified bad ass.”
Finding evidence of disloyalty in Rudd’s background is a tall order, but Loomer is up for the challenge. There are reports that Rudd once smiled at a passing Democrat, but the prevailing White House view is that this alone should not doom his nomination.
Kidding aside, Rudd is undoubtedly a fine leader and the kind of guy you can count on when the shit hits the fan. But the quest to find someone un-Loomerable means he’s probably not the best person for the job. He lacks the background in cyber operations and signals intelligence that are the NSA’s bread and butter. Then again, we had a podcaster serving as FBI deputy director, so maybe this concern is outdated.
The NSA is by far the largest intelligence agency and perhaps the most secretive. The old saw about the NSA was that it stood for “No Such Agency.” About 40 percent of its estimated workforce of around 40,000 is military. It’s also packed with people with advanced degrees in math, engineering, and computer science—the kind of smartypants who might decide that, rather than deal with Laura Loomer, they’ll go work on Wall Street or Silicon Valley for a lot more money and better parking.
That’s a good reason Loomer shouldn’t have a hand in picking NSA leadership. But there are many others.
The most alarming one is that it’s widely believed she’s being paid to post. Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, claimed in a post on X that “Laura is paid by the side that’s too afraid to come at me directly, but knows it’s losing.” Which side? He didn’t say, but he wasn’t wrong to suspect someone was pulling her strings. After all, how many MAGA activists wake up outraged about Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s acquisition of Juniper Networks?
That Loomer is being paid to tweet through various middlemen is an open secret in Washington. A consultant who works with the Trump administration told The New Yorker that some of his clients have hired Loomer to post on their behalf, and shared a Signal exchange that appeared to confirm it. Her attacks this summer on Vinay Prasad, a senior FDA scientist, were seen as part of a coordinated big Pharma pressure campaign, launched days after Prasad sought to halt a muscular dystrophy drug over safety concerns. This sort of thing used to be called lobbying.
Inside the administration, where her posts go off like a smoke detector with a dying battery, Loomer is viewed as a kind of coin-operated troll, aimed by rival factions at one another and despised by almost everyone except the president. Siccing Loomer on a rival is apparently considered dishonorable, like farting in an elevator and then getting off on the next floor.
One of Loomer’s obsessions is Qatar, which she maintains is secretly controlling America and funding terrorists, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Tucker Carlson. (Note: Whether Carlson is a terrorist is disputed.)
Qatar is a close U.S. ally. President Trump has agreed to guarantee the country’s security. It hosts Al Udeid Air Base, the largest US air base in the Middle East, where National Security Agency personnel have been stationed, and US pilots will soon train their Qatari counterparts in Idaho. At the same time, the oil- and gas-rich emirate has in the past been an NSA intelligence target. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed that the agency hacked Al Jazeera, which functioned both as a media outlet and as an instrument of the emirate’s foreign policy.
So the person with veto power over who runs America’s signals intelligence agency is someone who won’t shut up about a country that has previously been the subject of U.S. intelligence collection (and may still be for all I know) and who the nation’s top counterterrorism official—and many others—believe is compromised by undisclosed foreign or domestic interests.
But sure, let’s let her pick who runs the NSA. What could go wrong?
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"Siccing Loomer on a rival is apparently considered dishonorable, like farting in an elevator and then getting off on the next floor."
I’d gladly dishonor myself if she were on that elevator. Yes, even if I had to force it and suffered a shart.
That she gets away with this, with people of that reach is beyond me.
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