The former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee on Friday defended the panel’s current embattled chief and said Democrats are dramatically underplaying the seriousness of evidence the previous administration abused national security information.

Peter Hoekstra, who was the top Republican on the committee from 2004 to 2011, said on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that overreach by the intelligence community used to be a bipartisan concern.

“We were concerned about the expansion of, you know, the information data collection by the intelligence community.”

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“The Left, actually, and the conservatives can say, ‘We were right in the 2000s after 9/11,’” he said. “We were concerned about the expansion of, you know, the information data collection by the intelligence community.”

Hoekstra said critics warned massive collection of information could be turned against Americans.

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“It looks like that may be exactly what happened in the last, you know, few months of the Obama administration,” he said. He was referring to reports that officials in the White House were reviewing surveillance reports that reference President Donald Trump and his associates who had discussions with Russian officials after the election. “That they were targeting Trump transition people and that these records then made it over to the White House. They have nothing to do with national security.”

Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) has been under fire since he bypassed other members of his committee to brief the president about information indicating federal officials improperly “unmasked” the names of Trump and his associates in reports. Press reports indicates that some of that classified information was leaked to reporters.

Hoekstra said it was inappropriate for White House officials who essentially were “reading gossip” and then disseminating the information.

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“It is a huge abuse of power and illegal activity potentially coming right out of the White House,” he said.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, has hammered Nunes — especially after The New York Times this week named two White House officials who showed him the documents inside the White House complex. Hoekstra said the staffers who uncovered the documents did the right thing, consulting with an attorney and alerting the House committee with jurisdiction.

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“I wish there had been people in the CIA who had exposed John Brennan, the director of the CIA, targeting computers in the Senate,” he said, referring to the agency’s admission in 2014 that it improperly hacked into congressional computers in a search for documents it believe legislators had acquired illegally.

Hoekstra also said Nunes has nothing for which to apologize. He suggested Democrats are focusing on the process by which the information came to light in order to deflect attention on the substance of that information.

“He’s done nothing wrong,” he said. “There is a reason he’s called the chairman and Adam Schiff is called the ranking member … Where he initially saw them doesn’t make a difference. Who showed him, initially, doesn’t make a difference.”

The danger, Hoekstra said, is that abuses by the Obama administration will lead to restrictions on intelligence-gathering practices that will make the country less safe.

“It breaks the trust between the intelligence community and the American people … The intelligence community has abused authority,” he said.