Former Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough III said his job security had been threatened after he exposed Hillary Clinton for having 'Top Secret' emails on her unsecured server.

'I was told that we would be the first two to be fired with her administration,' McCullough said of himself and a colleague to Fox News, in an interview that aired Monday. 'That, that was definitely doing to happen.'

McCullough, an Obama appointee, had told Republican leadership of both the Senate Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees that some of Clinton's messages had surpassed the 'Top Secret' distinction and in January 2016, as Democratic primary voting was beginning, he faced an escalating backlash.

Former Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough III said his job security had been threatened after he exposed Hillary Clinton for having 'Top Secret' emails on her unsecured server

'I was told that we would be the first two to be fired with her administration,' Ex-Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough told Fox News Channel in an interview that aired Monday night

Photographed in April 2013, National Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough said there was an effort by Hillary Clinton's campaign to 'mislead people into thinking there is nothing to see here' when it came to her secret server and emails

'All of a sudden I became a shill of the right. I was told by members of Congress, "Be careful, you're losing your credibility. There are people out to get you,"' McCullough recalled.

As the inspector general, McCullough was charged with overseeing 17 agencies and worked under then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Clapper, McCullough told Fox, had seen the information and was also very concerned with Clinton's careless manner of handling government secrets.

'He read through these affidavits very thoroughly and he said, "This is extremely reckless," and he mentioned something about the campaign will have heartburn about that, or something,' McCullough recalled, stating the meeting occurred in either late December of 2015 or the early weeks of 2016.

'He was put-off as the rest of us were,' McCullough added.

After meeting with the DNI chief, McCullough said his team was marginalized, Fox reported.

'I was totally alone and I was told by senior official, keep the director out of it,' McCullough said.

Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign's strategy was to say there was nothing classified on her private server. And later, when classified emails were revealed, that they had been retroactively classified and weren't designated as such when they passed through her server.

'There was an effort, certainly, on the part of the campaign to mislead people into thinking there is nothing to see here,' McCullough charged.

He saw it as a 'coordinated strategy' as Democrats on the Hill questioned the impartiality of the email review, while the Obama White House muddied the waters.

'Frankly the thing that disappointed me the most was the president saying, "There's classified and then there's classified,"' McCullough said quoting former President Obama.

Obama made the remark in April 2016, as Clinton was two months away from winning the Democratic nomination.

'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, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source,' Obama told Fox News at the time.

McCullough noted how 'a lot of people in the intel community spend a lot of time keeping secrets, secret.'

'And to sort of inject that sense of confusion into people I don't think was, was altogether responsible,' he said.

Having seen the content, McCullough also disagreed with the ex-president's assessment.

'I've heard people say this is overblown. I've heard people say this is much ado about nothing. Had the information been released it would have been harm to national security,' McCullough told Fox.

When Herridge asked if lives would have been put at risk, McCullough said yes.

'Absolutely,' he responded. 'Sources and methods. Lives, operations.'

McCullough told Fox that he felt he had played the role of 'whistleblower' in this situation and, 'all of the sudden I was the enemy.'

'There was personal blowback,' he said. 'To me, to my family, to my office.'

Asked by Herridge what would have happened to him if he would have done the same thing as Clinton, the ex-inspector general gave a frank response.

'I'd be sitting in Leavenworth right now,' the former official stated.