JOHN BERMAN: So a new report in Axios this morning says that for the past eighteen months, the Trump White House has been given these detailed lists of government officials who aren't sufficiently loyal to the president. Joining us now is the author of this piece, National Political Reporter at Axios Jonathan Swan. I'm going to read some of your own reporting here. You say,

The Trump White House and its allies, over the past 18 months, assembled detailed lists of disloyal government officials to oust — and trusted pro-Trump people to replace them — according to more than a dozen sources familiar with the effort who spoke to Axios.

Do tell.

JONATHAN SWAN, AXIOS: So we've all read and seen about the current desire of the president to purge his government of people who are, quote-unquote, never-Trump, anti-Trump. He's used various phrases. He's told his new head of presidential personnel, which is his 29-year-old body man, that he wants to get rid of all the bad people. But this is -- I've been doing a lot of reporting on this to reconstruct how this came to be. And the president over the past 12 to 18 months has actually amassed a great deal of written material, memos, lists that have supported his suspicions.

Now, the memos have come from different corners, but a number of them have come from a group -- a group of conservative activists, very well-connected, called Groundswell, headed by Ginni Thomas, who is the wife of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Another person in the group is Republican staffer Barbara Ledeen. Now, they've been quite effective, if you look behind the scenes at this. They led the campaign to get rid of HR McMaster, the National Security Adviser. President Trump when he shocked his Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recently and withdrew after nominating Mnuchin's pick for this top position, Trump withdrew her at the last minute. That was based I'm told on a very detailed memo which laid out all the alleged misdeeds that Jessie Liu had committed in her former role as US Attorney for Washington, DC. The misdeeds included signing the sentencing filing for General Flynn, Michael Flynn. Included the fact that she did not indict the former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe. Obviously an enemy of President Trump's. And various other actions that she did or didn't take in her role as a US Attorney.

ALISYN CAMEROTA: Jonathan, any time we hear "blacklist" and "purge," it sends a shiver up the spine. I'm just trying to figure out right now if these are truly people on this list who were working at cross-purposes from the president so therefore would be some justification to needing them all to be gone in order to accomplish the agenda, or if these are just people who don't sufficiently praise the president and are just questioning some of the things that are being done as people in every administration do?

Well, it's interesting. There's no way to categorize all of them because they all fit different definitions of the term never-Trump. One senior official told me, the term never Trump, the term has lost all meaning. It gets attributed to people that sometimes people have a personal animus against. Sometimes they genuinely do oppose the president. But the other striking thing about this, we're three years into the presidency, and many of these people are people that President Trump appointed himself. Or that his cabinet secretaries appointed or that his own personnel office appointed. So he uses the term "deep state" in a very wide blanket way. But when he says "deep state" about a lot of these people, these are people who his own team appointed. So that's the other remarkable thing about this. And now we're in a situation where they're drawing up lists of names of people who are political appointees, Trump appointees, who are "disloyal," "never-Trump," etc.

BERMAN: That's a great point. By and large, if not many of these people are people appointed by the administration. Either hand-picked by him or hand-picked by the process that he put in place.

SWAN: Jessie Liu's not "deep state." She is is a political appointee put up by Steven Mnuchin -- worked in the Justice Department, appointed by the Trump administration even before that.

BERMAN: Who worked in the Justice Department, appointed by the Trump administration even before that.

SWAN: Yes!

BERMAN: The question is so what now? So what will be done with these lists? And I'm asking -- because, I've read this quote a few times on this show. Steve Bannon mentioned to "The Washington Post," of Donald Trump, he says: "Now he understands how to use the full powers of the presidency. The pearl clutchers better get used to it." Does this indicate that there will be some kind of purge -- that the president sees no boundaries to this anymore?

SWAN: We've seen people get marched out and fired and nominations withdrawn. The question is the scale of it. The ambition is there. Johnny McEntee has been given the purview to "clean house," quote-unquote. This is not just one agency. This is not just clearing out the FBI. We know Trump has had problems with DOJ. This is across government. So President Trump has talked about "snakes," quote-unquote, at various departments: The State Department, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security, The Pentagon, they recently fired the number-three there. And he's someone who conservative activists, including members of Groundswell, were campaigning against. So obviously they're fired -- reassigned, sorry, I think upwards of 50 people on the NSC. They're doing a dramatic downsizing there. So this is not when you say "will it happen?" It's already happening, the question is the scale to which they can execute it. One thing I will just add is -- when the President's head of the personnel office met with cabinet White House liaisons, on Thursday last week, he did tell them that some of the dramatic changes may have to wait until after the election. So there's a question about timing here too.

CAMEROTA: Everyone should read your reporting to understand what is coming down the pipeline. Some of this is chilling stuff.