The National Security Agency removed its top lawyer after The Daily Wire exposed her past work investigating President Donald Trump for Democrats and penning op-eds praising censorship and defending the intelligence community’s treatment of Trump associates like Carter Page.
The intelligence agency’s webpage listing April Doss as general counsel was deleted and “multiple former officials” told The New York Times that Doss had been removed. The removal shows that, after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said documents show a conspiracy of “manufactured intelligence” to sabotage the president, the Trump administration is taking steps to ensure that people involved in the discredited probe are not still actively working in key roles.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), when serving as the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel, hired Doss to tie Trump to Russia. Warner lashed out at her firing, further illustrating her close ties to Democrats.
“We should be outraged by the firing of April Doss, a deeply principled public servant, apparently for the role that she played in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s bipartisan investigation into Russian election interference,” Warner said, according to NBC. “Her dismissal appears to be the result of a politically motivated smear campaign driven by a far-right conspiracy theorist, not any legitimate concern about her conduct or qualifications.”
The Daily Wire’s July 23 story showed how Doss had repeatedly made mistakes by advocating for the might of the security state to clamp down on “misinformation” in cases where she turned out to be wrong. That included using criticism of vaccines as justification for crackdowns and blaming Republican “extremists” for a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, where there is evidence that federal assets actually entrapped the suspects.
Doss falsely accused Trump — until this week her boss — of causing an “insurrection,” despite no one being charged with such a crime, and said the January 6 protest was “deadly,” a reference to the false claims that protesters had killed police there. She also defended the treatment of Michael Flynn and Carter Page.
Doss’s strong advocacy for censorship by the government and tech firms put her at odds with important policy planks of the Trump administration. Trump’s Federal Trade Commission has aggressively investigated ad firms for their role in censoring so-called disinformation, such as the New York Post’s true story about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The story also explained how NSA officials concealed Doss’s 2022 hire from Congress because officials and Democrats had blocked the appointment of a Republican with a similar background into the same general counsel role in Trump’s first term, calling it inappropriately political — a move they knew would open them to charges of double standards if Doss’s hiring were known.
Just as they did during the failed Russia investigation, the media and Democrats worked together to spread misinformation after Doss was terminated.
Warner said Doss “appeared to” have been fired because of Laura Loomer, after the Times used the sub-headline “a far-right conspiracy theorist had amplified criticism of the lawyer and her previous work.” Much of the article’s framing revolved around the fact that Loomer had shared an X post summarizing The Daily Wire’s story, while omitting the story’s actual findings, other than the fact that Doss had previously worked for Democrats.
Although the Times’ decision to focus on a literal retweet instead of the actual story was unusual, the rest of the media immediately adopted it verbatim, with MSNBC’s headline blaring “Right-wing influencer allegedly helps oust a National Security Agency leader (again),” and The Daily Beast saying “Witch Hunter Laura Loomer Claims Scalp of NSA’s Top Lawyer.”
The Times’ claim that Doss’s removal was due to Loomer — which the paper used to discredit the move, because it has previously painted her as a “far-right” conspiracy theorist with inappropriate influence in the Trump administration — was also based on misinformation, with the paper saying an anonymous person told it “Loomer’s criticism appeared to have a role in the firing.”
Joel Valdez, a Pentagon spokesman, had indicated to The Daily Wire that Doss’s firing was in process ever since the outlet asked about her on July 17, saying that there would be an “update” on her employment status coming shortly. Loomer’s retweet came only after The Daily Wire story was published July 23.