In the face of the most serious threat to his presidency yet, Donald Trump has now resorted to disparaging and even threatening the unnamed whistleblower who bravely brought his now-infamous call with Ukraine’s president to the public’s attention.

In the chilling audio of the comments published by the Los Angeles Times on Thursday, Trump can be heard saying that the person who told the whistleblower of his attempt to solicit help in his re-election campaign from a foreign country was “close to a spy”. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart with spies and treason, right?” Trump remarked. “We used to handle it a little differently than we do now.”

Trump’s disturbing comments show that now is not just the time for the House to move forward on impeachment. Our representatives also need to pass a series of whistleblower and secrecy reforms so no president can attempt to manipulate our democracy like this again. Trump is merely an egregious and horrifying symptom of the underlying problem that has plagued the US government for decades.

While Trump’s “spy” comments were certainly shocking, in reality, they are actually not that far off from official justice department policy when dealing with whistleblowers who go to the press with classified information.

For years, many of these brave people – who have exposed CIA torture, drone strikes, unprecedented cyber attacks and mass surveillance – have been prosecuted by administrations from both parties under the Espionage Act, a law written 100 years ago meant for spies.

As far back as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg during the Nixon administration, sources of journalists charged under the Espionage Act are allowed no public interest defense whatsoever, meaning that they are barred from telling a jury why they went to the public with newsworthy information. They are also prohibited from telling the court about the massive public benefits that may have resulted from their disclosures. For most of them, it means an automatic guilty verdict and years behind bars.

Now, there are many commentators trying to differentiate what the still-anonymous whistleblower did in the current situation – going through internal whistleblower channels – from other whistleblowers who go to the press. But those people are either being naive or purposefully misleading.

While the Trump whistleblower did not leak anything himself, other people did. When the complaint was being withheld from Congress, a slow but steady stream of leaks to the press revealed more and more about what was in the complaint every day, creating a massive media firestorm and forcing Democrats to come out forcefully for impeachment – all before Congress or the public ever saw Trump’s phone call summary or the complaint itself.

Congress has a unique opportunity here. It’s long past time that they passed robust whistleblower protections for all intelligence community members so they don’t have to constantly worry about retaliation or worse for exposing illegal or corrupt actions.

The Trump whistleblower was almost stopped in his tracks and could have been retaliated against at at least two points along the way. First, as was reported by the New York Times just yesterday, the CIA initially went to the White House to ask for its opinion on the whistleblower complaint before doing anything. By doing so they were alerting the very people being who were being reported for misdeeds, while also potentially putting the whistleblower at risk. Then, the director of national intelligence initially refused to hand over the complaint to Congress, even though the law required him too.

Thanks to public pressure, those attempting to stifle the whistleblower were thwarted, but it’s impossible to know how many other whistleblowers have been undermined through similar means.

And it’s not just internal whistleblower protections, or the Espionage Act, that Congress has the opportunity to change; it’s a chance to pass classification reform as well. The whistleblower, after all, wrote in his complaint that this information he was reporting should not have been classified in the first place. Yet we also learned on Thursday that the president’s team had secretly placed the Ukraine call notes in a sensitive computer system meant for highly classified information, in an attempt to hide it from others. It’s a gross abuse of the secrecy system which will likely go unpunished.

In theory, using official secrecy classifications to hide embarrassing or illegal conduct is already prohibited by the executive order governing the US government’s classification regime. However, in practice, government officials overclassify information all the time and are never punished for doing so. It’s part of the reason why the government has been able to hide so many illegal programs like torture and mass spying from federal courts for so long without any accountability.

Let’s remember that whistleblower and former NSA contractor Reality Winner is currently serving a five year jail sentence and has been all but forgotten by many of the pundits who talk non-stop about foreign interference in elections. Winner’s crime was leaking an NSA document containing evidence that entities in Russia were attempting to hack into election infrastructure ahead of the 2016 election. Much of the information she pled guilty to leaking was later declassified in the Mueller investigation, yet she is currently suffering behind bars – all for attempting to alert the American public about a threat to democracy.

Trump is the clear culprit here, and he finally may get he deserves, but we must not let this opportunity pass without reforming the system that has allowed Trump’s misdeeds to go unchecked in the first place.