Toying with access to classified information has become the White House’s go-to method for drawing attention away from screw-ups and scandals. On July 23, the White House faced a grim news cycle in response to President Trump’s disastrous Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Then the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, announced that Mr. Trump was “looking to take away” the security clearances of a number of former top officials who had criticized him, among them the former C.I.A. director John Brennan.

Early this week, the president flung insults at his former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman as speculation heated up over the existence of a tape of Mr. Trump using a noxious racial slur during his tenure on “The Apprentice.” Then on Wednesday, Ms. Sanders began her press briefing with a notice that the president had stripped Mr. Brennan of his clearance.

It has become cliché to complain about the Trump administration’s use of distractions to divert the press from unwelcome news, but this time the White House didn’t even put any effort into hiding it. The document announcing Mr. Trump’s decision was dated July 26 — suggesting strongly that the White House had been saving it for a rainy day. (After this was pointed out, the administration quickly issued a second, undated copy.) What's more, Mr. Trump himself told The Wall Street Journal that he had revoked Mr. Brennan's clearance because of the former official's role in leading “the rigged witch hunt.”

On one level, this particular distraction is vindictive but unimportant. John Brennan will be fine, and so will most of the other officials — including James Comey, Sally Yates and James Clapper — whose clearances Ms. Sanders threatened during the briefing. They have the power and visibility to continue criticizing the president as loudly as they like on cable news — and on Twitter, where Mr. Brennan has taken to attacking Mr. Trump as “treasonous” and “disgraceful.”