The lawyer for accused WikiLeaks collaborator Bradley Manning suggested Monday that President Barack Obama’s position on protecting government whistleblowers is hypocritical.

Obama put his signature on a new law designed to stiffen protections for whistleblowers on Nov. 27. “As President Obama was signing this bill into law, Brad and I were in a courtroom,” Manning’s defense attorney, David E. Coombs, said Monday at the All Souls Church Unitarian in Washington, D.C., in his first public appearance since taking the case more than two years ago. “How can you reconcile the two? I don’t know the answer to that question.”

Manning, 24, is the Army private who allegedly gave WikiLeaks thousands of classified diplomatic cables about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, along with videos of two deadly airstrikes that killed non-combatants. When revealed by the controversial whistleblower website WikiLeaks, the documents sent diplomatic shockwaves that reverberated across the world.

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