Former Attorney General Ed Meese, who served under President Ronald Reagan, called into question the legitimacy of the whistleblower at the center of the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump in an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller.

Meese, who now serves as the Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow Emeritus at The Heritage Foundation, told the Caller he has seen no evidence that warrants impeachment of the president, and criticized the largely closed-door process being conducted by House Democrats.

“If this were really a fact-finding exercise to determine if the president did something wrong it would be handled according to entirely different rules and with an entirely different focus and direction of the proceedings,” Meese said.

He also referred to the so-called whistleblower as a “phony,” noting that the individual had no firsthand knowledge of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine wherein he allegedly exerted a pressure campaign against a foreign government to investigate his political opponent.

“This individual is not a whistleblower,” Meese told the Daily Caller. “A whistleblower is someone who has personal knowledge of wrongdoing. At the most what we have in this case is a person who has taken information on a second and thirdhand basis from other people, and instead of revealing some dark secret, has given his opinion of what the significance of that information is.” (RELATED: Whistleblower Had No ‘Direct Knowledge’ Of Trump Telephone Call)

“What they did was more like a lawyer’s brief disagreeing with what the president allegedly did than real information that normally you would associate with a whistleblower who is complying with that statute,” he concluded.

WATCH: