Loud objections from the Department of Justice and the FBI to release of a memo by the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence are likely based on embarrassment, not legitimate security concerns, a defense expert said Friday.

Rebecca Grant, president of IRIS Independent Research and director of the Washington Security Forum, said on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that the agency’s objections are “puzzling” and revealing.

“It’s just crazy, isn’t it?” she told guest host John Hinderaker. “I imagine them getting a Sharpie and writing, ‘Please, please, keep it classified’ and, what, slipping it under the door of the Oval Office?”

She added, “I just don’t get it. To me, they seem to be panicking.”

The memo is the product of Republican staffers working on the intelligence panel for its chairman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), summarizing classified information concerning surveillance and judicial abuses by the FBI throughout the 2016 campaign.

It was during the campaign that law enforcement authorities used the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to eavesdrop on conversations among individuals with links to the Russian government and associates of President Donald Trump and his campaign staff.

The memo was made public Friday.

Grant noted that the Pentagon has not raised objections.

“In my experience at looking at these documents, it’s usually embarrassing conversations that stay classified the longest,” she said.

Grant pointed to one example of documents indicating that President Dwight Eisenhower was aware that the Soviet Union knew America was spying via U-2 planes and agonized over whether to end the missions before one of the aircraft was shot down. She said that information only recently became declassified even though there was no national security reason to keep it secret so long.

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Grant said the main reasons for classifying information are to protect secrets about weapons and to conceal how agents learned information. She said she suspects the memo merely will make the FBI look bad in its reliance on an opposition research dossier prepared by a former British agent, Christopher Steele — and paid for indirectly by the Democratic National Committee and the campaign of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Related: Dem Rep. Says Americans ‘Need to Know’ What’s in the Nunes Memo, Too

That dossier contains a host of embarrassing but unsubstantiated allegations about Trump that the Russians had supposedly compiled on him. But U.S. investigators have not been able to verify large portions of the salacious document.

Grant said she suspects the freakout over the memo is overblown.

“There may be less in there than we think,” she said. “We’re gonna see some embarrassing conversations, some embarrassing things that were said to the FISA court about that dossier. But it may be less than we think.”

PoliZette senior writer Brendan Kirby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.