“You’re going to have a showdown on the 23rd,” one person close to the White House told me Monday afternoon, presaging a potential skirmish between John Kelly, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior aide. Kelly has alienated supporters within the West Wing over his handling of the Rob Porter scandal. And last Friday, when Kelly issued a memo outlining changes to the White House security-clearance protocol in the post-Porter era, people around the White House wondered whether Kushner may be one of them. Effective this coming Friday, February 23, Kelly has announced that White House employees without a permanent security clearance, whose applications have been pending since June 1—a category that includes Kushner—will no longer be issued an interim clearance. (Abbe Lowell, Kushner’s attorney, has noted that it is “not uncommon for this process to take this long in a new administration” and said that “no concerns were raised” about his client’s application.)

Initially, some saw it as a calculated move. As The Washington Post reported last week, Kelly has been irked by Kushner’s access to high-level information without a permanent clearance, and was well aware of the fact that his new policy could put up a roadblock for the First Son-in-Law, who had been jokingly referred to as “the Secretary of Everything.” The person close to the White House described the interplay in all its delicacy: “You have Jared, who’s been floating ideas of who his father-in-law will replace Kelly with, on one side; and Kelly, who’s basically saying, ‘Fuck you, Jared.’” A source familiar with Kushner’s thinking said that he does not blame anyone for the memo and does not feel like he has been unfairly targeted. “Does he feel like it raises a lot of questions that need to be answered? Yes.” (The source disputed reports that Kushner and his wife, fellow White House aide Ivanka Trump, have pushed for Kelly’s ouster, saying the two have been privately supportive of the chief of staff and have vocally stood up to his critics.)

By Tuesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders attempted to answer some of those questions at the press briefing. “No decision within the memo will impact anything that Jared Kushner is working on,” she said, adding that “nothing that has taken place will affect the valuable work Jared is doing.”

The memo is another setback for a White House again consumed by chaos. While Trump attempted to roll out his second so-called Infrastructure Week, last week, his administration was consumed by the ongoing Porter scandal, Scott Pruitt’s latest airline hijinks, and news that Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin had the government foot the bill for a personal travel concierge and his wife’s expenses on a 10-day Euro trip last summer, which included a stop at Wimbledon. The fallout from l’affaire Stormy Daniels also continued as The New Yorker published an account of another Playboy model who claims she had an affair with Trump around the same time. This was all subsumed, of course, by the tragic events at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people lost their lives, Trump’s refusal to mention guns in his speech after the massacre, and the students’ moving effort to petition lawmakers about gun violence. The week capped off with special counsel Robert Mueller indicting 13 Russians for interference in the 2016 presidential election, just as President Trump headed out for a three-day weekend at his private club in Palm Beach with his adult sons, Don Jr. and Eric.