For the near­ly eight years of Pres­i­dent Obama’s pres­i­den­cy, nation­al secu­ri­ty offi­cials and the pres­i­dent him­self have insist­ed that unau­tho­rized leaks of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion are an unam­bigu­ous threat to nation­al secu­ri­ty and leak­ers must be hunt­ed down, pros­e­cut­ed and discouraged.

Look at the case of John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who so far is the only person to go to jail over the government’s use of torture—not because he took part in it, but because in the course of blowing the whistle on the practice, he told a reporter the name of an undercover officer.

Through this rea­son­ing, the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion has insti­tut­ed a gov­ern­ment pro­gram to weed out poten­tial leak­ers; thrown an accused whistle­blow­er into 11 months of soli­tary con­fine­ment before she was found guilty of any crime; charged more than twice the num­ber of peo­ple as all oth­er admin­is­tra­tions com­bined with vio­lat­ing the 99-year old Espi­onage Act; and even briefly threat­ened to crim­i­nal­ize jour­nal­ism itself.

But now, with Hillary Clin­ton in hot water after 22 of the emails found on her pri­vate serv­er were retroac­tive­ly deemed ​“Top Secret,” the admin­is­tra­tion appears to be chang­ing its tune. Faced with the prospect that a Demo­c­ra­t­ic fron­trun­ner and high-rank­ing polit­i­cal fig­ure may have improp­er­ly han­dled clas­si­fied mate­r­i­al, some admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials are sud­den­ly apply­ing much more nuance to the issue of unau­tho­rized disclosures.

“There’s clas­si­fied, and then there’s clas­si­fied,” Oba­ma told Fox News’ Chris Wal­lace. ​“There’s stuff that is real­ly top secret top secret, and there’s stuff that is being pre­sent­ed to the pres­i­dent or the sec­re­tary of state, that you might not want on the tran­som, or going out over the wire.”

For the record, the gov­ern­ment defines ​“Top Secret” as infor­ma­tion whose dis­clo­sure could cause ​“excep­tion­al­ly grave dam­age to the nation­al security.”

It was a curi­ous argu­ment — one based not on the idea that Clin­ton hadn’t delib­er­ate­ly bro­ken the law, as the whistle­blow­ers Oba­ma has gone after did, but a sort of know­ing wink that the U.S. government’s claims about the dan­ger of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion were vast­ly overblown.

It was also a 180-degree rever­sal on what Oba­ma had told a sup­port­er of Chelsea Man­ning, the Wik­iLeaks whistle­blow­er who leaked hun­dreds of thou­sands of U.S. diplo­mat­ic cables, back in 2011:

…peo­ple can have philo­soph­i­cal views [about Chelsea Man­ning] but I can’t con­duct diplo­ma­cy on an open source [basis]… That’s not how the world works. … And I have to abide by cer­tain rules of clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion. If I were to release mate­r­i­al I weren’t allowed to, I’d be break­ing the law. We’re a nation of laws! We don’t let indi­vid­u­als make their own deci­sions about how the laws oper­ate. [She] broke the law.

When chal­lenged that Man­ning had sim­ply done what cel­e­brat­ed whistle­blow­er Daniel Ells­berg had done in leak­ing the Pen­ta­gon Papers, Oba­ma denied the com­par­i­son was accu­rate on the basis that ​“Ellsberg’s mate­r­i­al wasn’t clas­si­fied in the same way.”

Oba­ma was right: The Pen­ta­gon Papers were ​“Top Secret,” the same clas­si­fi­ca­tion as Clinton’s 22 emails, while none of Manning’s doc­u­ments were clas­si­fied as such — only ​“Secret” and ​“Con­fi­den­tial.” Yet Man­ning will be in jail until she’s 60, and it’s dif­fi­cult to see Oba­ma wav­ing away her actions on the basis that what she leaked wasn’t real­ly clas­si­fied, as he appears to be doing with Clinton.

Obama’s com­ments come a few months after Clinton’s cam­paign man­ag­er com­plained about ​“over­clas­si­fi­ca­tion run amok,” after sev­en of her email chains had been declared ​“Top Secret,” a claim her cam­paign repeat­ed in March. Clin­ton was serv­ing as sec­re­tary of state at the time that Man­ning had been arrest­ed and thrown in soli­tary, and when her chief spokesman at the time called her treat­ment ​“ridicu­lous and coun­ter­pro­duc­tive and stu­pid,” he was forced to resign over the comments.

Cur­rent Sec­re­tary of State John Ker­ry has also weighed in with a sim­i­lar sen­ti­ment, telling the Huff­in­g­ton Post ear­li­er this month that there’s a ​“mas­sive amount of over­clas­si­fi­ca­tion. Peo­ple just stamp­ing on quick­ly because it’s a way to, sort of, be correct.”

It’s not that Oba­ma, Clin­ton and Ker­ry are wrong. The U.S. gov­ern­ment does indeed suf­fer from a prob­lem of over­clas­si­fi­ca­tion, and there’s more than a small like­li­hood that at least a good part of Clinton’s ​“Top Secret” emails are a result of this prob­lem. But where was this nuance and hedg­ing from admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials when it came to one of the many whistle­blow­ers who were crushed under the heavy hand of the Jus­tice Depart­ment over the last eight years?

Con­sid­er the case of Stephen Kim, a for­mer State Depart­ment staff mem­ber who lost his life sav­ings, saw his mar­riage fall apart, spi­ralled into sui­ci­dal depres­sion and was ulti­mate­ly thrown in jail for 10 months, all for mere­ly dis­cussing a clas­si­fied report with a jour­nal­ist that gov­ern­ment offi­cials pri­vate­ly acknowl­edged wasn’t in any way important.

Or look at the case of John Kiri­ak­ou, a for­mer CIA offi­cer who so far is the only per­son to go to jail over the government’s use of tor­ture — not because he took part in it, but because in the course of blow­ing the whis­tle on the prac­tice, he told a reporter the name of an under­cov­er offi­cer. Even though the officer’s name was nev­er pub­lished, the Jus­tice Depart­ment went after him with the full force of the law, sen­tenc­ing him to jail for two and a half years. Mean­while, recall that some of Clinton’s emails are alleged to con­tain iden­ti­fy­ing details of under­cov­er officers.

Or look at the case of Jef­frey Ster­ling, whose life was sim­i­lar­ly destroyed by an Espi­onage Act charge that came a whole six years after the crime he was sup­posed to have com­mit­ted took place. These are just three cas­es of many, and for none of these cas­es has the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion made the case that not all clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion is cre­at­ed equal.

This does fit with the Oba­ma administration’s long-stand­ing dou­ble stan­dard when it comes to leaks, how­ev­er — name­ly, that when gov­ern­ment offi­cials do it, it’s hunky dory. The Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion makes a reg­u­lar habit of leak­ing infor­ma­tion to the press when it’s con­ve­nient and flat­ter­ing. More recent­ly, doc­u­ments obtained by Vice News revealed that CIA offi­cials inad­ver­tent­ly revealed clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion in the course of advis­ing mem­bers of the enter­tain­ment indus­try, includ­ing infor­ma­tion that was ​“Secret” — the same clas­si­fi­ca­tion as some of Chelsea Manning’s leaks.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, future admin­is­tra­tions like­ly won’t be fol­low­ing Obama’s off-hand com­ments about what is and isn’t ​“real­ly top secret” when they come to pow­er. Instead, it will be his much less nuanced actions regard­ing leaks and whistle­blow­ers that will be his legacy.