“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy,” Donald Trump told voters in the midst of his run for office. “I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy.” And, perhaps unsurprisingly, little has changed now that he’s actually installed in the Oval Office. After promising shortly after the election to arrange things so he would “in no way have a conflict of interest with various businesses,” the ex–real-estate developer is perhaps one of the most ethically compromised presidents in recent memory. The Trump Organization, in which he retains a financial stake, is run by his two sons, one of whom has told the press he gives his father quarterly financial reports. The business promotes overseas deals, but claims it’s kosher because they were struck prior to the November 9, 2016. Trump regularly hosts foreign heads of state at his for-profit club Mar-a-Lago, where the initiation fee doubled shortly before the inauguration, and where the presidential seal is printed on golf markers. Out-of-towners know the best way to get on the president’s good side is to patronize his establishments—“Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’” an Asian diplomat told The Washington Post shortly after the election. Foreign governments, in an effort to curry favor with Trump, have reportedly “donated public land, approved permits, and eased environmental regulations for Trump-branded developments, creating a slew of potential conflicts as foreign leaders make investments that can be seen as gifts or attempts to gain access to the American president through his sprawling business empire.” The Chinese government has granted Trump dozens of trademarks. (First Daughter and White House employee Ivanka Trump has also done pretty well for herself.) And, of course, the financial and ethical entanglements don’t end at the top. Rather, Trump presides over a White House in which $31,000 dining sets and taxpayer-funded trips to Europe to take in Wimbledon are par for the course, and you basically have to have a scandal every day for six-months straight to get fired. So it was a bit surprising, to say the least, to hear the White House say on Monday that it’s considering revoking the security clearances of several former high-ranking officials for supposedly making money off their time in government.

During a regular press briefing, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters that Trump is “exploring the mechanism” to strip six former senior national security officials who have criticized him of their access to classified information. “They’ve politicized and in some cases monetized their public service and security clearances,” Sanders said. “Making baseless accusations of improper contact with Russia or being influenced by Russia against the president is extremely inappropriate.” Per Sanders, the list of former officials who could have their clearances revoked include former C.I.A. director John Brennan, former F.B.I. director James Comey, former national security adviser, U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, former F.B.I. deputy director Andrew McCabe, former director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former director of the National Security Agency Michael Hayden.

Of course, considering this is an administration in which being under investigation for secretly being paid to lobby on behalf of a foreign government gets you hired, one can’t help but wonder whether something else is at play here! Could it possibly be certain recent comments from Brennan, who called Trump’s performance in Helsinki “nothing short of treasonous,” and Clapper, who told CNN, “More and more, I come to the conclusion that after the Helsinki performance and since, that I really do wonder whether the Russians have something on him. I think his behavior was just unbelievable”? The president is certainly no fan of either former official, or of Rice, whose credibility he’s called into question; or of McCabe, who he’s attacked multiple times; or of Hayden, who’s called him “unstable, erratic, and thin-skinned”; or of Comey, who has that whole book thing. And then, of course, there’s the fact that Michael Flynn miraculously maintained his security clearance while leading a “Lock her up!” chant during the Republican National Convention and covertly working as a paid lobbyist for Turkey. Are we sensing a discrepancy here?

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, for one, seems to think the threat is total bulls--t. “I don’t know whether they’ve been abusing their security clearance at all,” he told reporters Monday, calling Trump’s claims “a very serious allegation.” Clapper himself, meanwhile, called the move “a very, very petty thing to do,” adding, “The security clearance has nothing to do with how I or any of us feel about the president. I don’t get briefings, I don’t have access to any classified information, it’s frankly more of a courtesy.” McCabe, of course, had his security clearance revoked when he left the F.B.I. in January. And in a tweet, Hayden basically said, Bring it on you simpleminded moron:

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