Numerous firings of White House personnel may come as soon as next week, Politico cited two administration officials familiar with the matter in a Thursday report.
The report said that West Wing aides referred to the planned firings as "The Purge."
However, despite the recent Signalgate scandal by national security adviser Mike Waltz, one White House official cited by the report said that he would not be among those fired, and would continue serving in the Trump administration, with the US president even writing on Truth Social that he would appoint him to the US ambassador of the UN, replacing congresswoman Elise Stefanik.
What was Signalgate all about?
Signalgate refers to an incident where Waltz had accidentally invited Atlantic editor-in-chief and former Jerusalem Post columnist Jeffrey Goldberg onto the Signal messaging service of their group in March, where they discussed plans to strike Houthi targets in Yemen.
One individual close to the White House was quoted by Politico saying that Waltz was "too cocky. He’s a staff member, but he was acting like a principal." Even before Signalgate, Trump administration officials were reportedly "irked by his approach," according to the report.
Trump did actually weigh firing Waltz after the leaked messages, but chose not to do so, according to a Politico report from late March. The administration later even defended Waltz and US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, even after the latter had been involved in a second scandal of classified leaked messages where he shared details of a March attack on Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis in a message group that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to the New York Times.
The Signal chat leak reportedly outraged Israeli officials, as it contained sensitive intelligence Israel shared with the US from a human source in Yemen, CBS reported.
Goldberg wrote in his piece that he knew the strikes on Yemen were coming hours prior to their occurrence as a result of being added to the chat. He did not believe the group chat to be genuine at first glance, and also wrote that he believed someone else was masquerading as him over the phone.