There’s a lot of delicious irony in the Justice Department inspector general’s report finding that former FBI Director James Comey violated FBI rules by retaining four memos documenting President Donald Trump’s efforts to obstruct the Russia investigation. In the report, the guy who made a career prosecuting people who leaked information for the public good was scolded for doing the very same things past whistle-blowers have been punished for, including holding on to official documents and sharing classified information with their lawyers (and, through them, the media). It turns out Comey didn’t fare too well when his own standards were applied to him.

It is doubly ironic that the man who roiled the 2016 election by accusing Hillary Clinton of being “extremely careless” with her emails, some of which were retroactively classified, has been accused of leaking classified information because one to four words in a document he took home were deemed confidential after the fact.

But there’s an aspect of the report that, when compared with the inspector general’s past practice in a similar case, suggests the office piled on the accusations against Comey to provide basis for a headline-grabbing censure, even where there was no basis for prosecution. Indeed, Trump made the most of the inspector general’s rebuke, asserting that Comey had been “thoroughly disgraced and excoriated” by the report’s conclusions.

According to the report, Comey documented the damning things the president said to him in a series of one-on-one meetings because he believed a contemporaneous record might be necessary “at some point to protect myself and to protect the FBI.” That’s also why he kept a copy of four of the memos—all unclassified at the time—at home in his personal safe.

That’s roughly the same reason that former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales kept notes he drafted in 2004, back when he was the White House counsel, at President George W. Bush’s request. He wrote the notes shortly after briefing top members of Congress about a warrantless wiretapping program he had a role in authorizing. Gonzales would later say that he drafted the notes merely to record lawmakers’ reactions, though the notes included operational details of the program and its code name, Stellar Wind.