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Conflict Erupts in Public Rebuke on C.I.A. Inquiry

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee.Credit...Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

WASHINGTON — A festering conflict between the Central Intelligence Agency and its congressional overseers broke into the open Tuesday when Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee and one of the C.I.A.’s staunchest defenders, delivered an extraordinary denunciation of the agency, accusing it of withholding information about its treatment of prisoners and trying to intimidate committee staff members investigating the detention program.

Describing what she called a “defining moment” for the oversight of American spy agencies, Ms. Feinstein said the C.I.A. had removed documents from computers used by Senate Intelligence Committee staff members working on a report about the agency’s detention program, searched the computers after the committee completed its report and referred a criminal case to the Justice Department in an attempt to thwart their investigation.

The 6,300-page report has been at the center of a bitter dispute between the committee and the agency, which says it contains many inaccuracies that must be corrected before it is released.

Ms. Feinstein’s disclosures came a week after it was first reported that the C.I.A. last year had monitored computers used by her staff in an effort to learn how the committee may have gained access to the agency’s own internal review of the detention and interrogation program that became perhaps the most criticized part of the American government’s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Ms. Feinstein said the internal review bolstered the conclusions of the committee’s still-classified report on the program, which President Obama officially ended in January 2009 after sharply criticizing it during the 2008 presidential campaign.

For an intelligence community already buffeted by controversies over electronic surveillance and armed drone strikes, the rupture with Ms. Feinstein, one of its closest congressional allies, could have broad ramifications.

Ms. Feinstein has proved to be a bulwark for intelligence agencies in recent years: publicly defending the National Security Agency’s telephone and Internet surveillance activities, the C.I.A.’s authority over drone strikes and the F.B.I.’s actions under the Patriot Act against a growing bipartisan chorus of critics.

“Feinstein has always pushed the agency in private and defended it in public,” said Amy B. Zegart, who studies intelligence issues at Stanford University. “Now she is skewering the C.I.A. in public. This is a whole new world for the C.I.A.”

Ms. Feinstein, who had refused to comment on the dispute between the C.I.A. and her committee, took the Senate floor on Tuesday morning to say the agency’s actions had breached constitutional provisions for the separation of powers and “were a potential effort to intimidate.”

“How this will be resolved will show whether the Intelligence Committee can be effective in monitoring and investigating our nation’s intelligence activities, or whether our work can be thwarted by those we oversee,” she said.

Hours later, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, forcefully denied Ms. Feinstein’s assertions that the agency had carried out a broad effort to spy on the committee’s work.

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Senator Dianne Feinstein states on the Senate floor that the Central Intelligence Agency has accessed the computers of the Senate intelligence committee.CreditCredit...J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Mr. Brennan said in response to questions during an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

Referring to Justice Department inquiries now underway, Mr. Brennan urged Senate critics to await the results of those reviews before leveling accusations against the C.I.A.

“When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong,” he said.

Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, declined to say whether Mr. Obama had spoken to Mr. Brennan, who served as a White House adviser during the president’s first term, about the C.I.A. controversy. “Well, let me just say, folks here and in the administration have been in regular consultation with Chairman Feinstein about the broader issues here,” Mr. Carney said. “We’ve made clear that we want to see the report’s findings declassified.”

In her 45-minute speech, Ms. Feinstein gave the fullest public account of the years of back-room jousting between her committee and the C.I.A. over the agency’s detention program, and its use of secret prisons and brutal interrogation techniques like waterboarding that critics described as torture.

The dispute came to a head in mid-January when Mr. Brennan told members of the committee that the agency had carried out a search of computers used by committee investigators at a C.I.A. facility in Northern Virginia, where the committee was examining documents the agency had made available for its report.

Ms. Feinstein said on Tuesday that during the meeting, Mr. Brennan told her that the C.I.A. had searched a “walled-off committee network drive containing the committee’s own internal work product and communications” and that he was going to “order further forensic evidence of the committee network to learn more about activities of the committee’s oversight staff.”

The C.I.A. had carried out the search to determine whether committee investigators may have gained unauthorized access to the internal review of the detention program that the agency had carried out without informing the committee. Ms. Feinstein on Tuesday vigorously disputed this allegation, saying the document had been included — intentionally or not — as part of a dump of millions of pages the C.I.A. had provided for the Intelligence Committee.

Mr. Brennan, in a January letter to Ms. Feinstein that a government official who did not want to be identified released on Tuesday, said the committee had not been entitled to the internal review because it contained “sensitive, deliberative, pre-decisional C.I.A. material”— and therefore was protected under executive privilege considerations.

The letter, attached to a statement that Mr. Brennan issued to the agency’s employees on Tuesday, raised questions about Ms. Feinstein’s statements earlier in the day concerning at what point the committee came into possession of the internal review.

The C.I.A.’s acting general counsel has referred the matter to the Justice Department as a possible criminal offense, a move Ms. Feinstein called a strong-arm tactic by someone with a conflict of interest in the case. She said that that official had previously been a lawyer in the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center — the section of the spy agency that was running the detention and interrogation program — and that his name is mentioned more than 1,600 times in the committee’s report.

Ms. Feinstein did not name the lawyer, but she appeared to be referring to Robert Eatinger, the C.I.A.’s senior deputy general counsel. In 2007, The New York Times reported that when a top C.I.A. official in 2005 destroyed videotapes of brutal interrogations of Al Qaeda detainees, Mr. Eatinger had been one of two lawyers to approve their destruction.

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John O. Brennan of the C.I.A.Credit...Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Ms. Feinstein specifically mentioned the destruction of the tapes as justification for her staff’s removal of copies of parts of the internal C.I.A. review from the Northern Virginia facility and decision to take the documents to the committee’s offices on Capitol Hill.

She said it was necessary to “preserve and protect” a copy of the review, which she said “corroborates critical information” of the committee’s own investigation.

Ms. Feinstein said that on two occasions in 2010, the C.I.A. had removed documents totaling hundreds of pages from the computer server used by her staff at the Northern Virginia facility. She did not provide any details about the documents, but said that when committee investigators confronted the C.I.A. they received a number of answers — first a denial that the documents had been removed, then an explanation that they had been removed by contractors working at the facility, then an explanation that the removal of documents was ordered by the White House.

When the committee approached the White House, she said, it denied giving such an order.

Ms. Feinstein’s broadside rallied Senate Democrats, but divided Republicans.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said that he supported Ms. Feinstein “unequivocally” and that he was “disappointed” in the C.I.A.’s conduct. When Mr. Reid brought up the speech at a closed-door lunch of Senate Democrats, Ms. Feinstein received a standing ovation.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who for years has done battle with the C.I.A. over the agency’s detention and interrogation program, called the allegations “very disturbing” and suggested an independent investigative body might need to be impaneled to get to the bottom of the dispute.

Most Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, however, either refused to comment on the chairwoman’s charges or said she had no right to air such grievances in public.

“You have to understand, as a longtime member of both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, I personally don’t believe anything that goes on in the Intelligence Committee should be discussed publicly,” said Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina.

But such conflicts with the executive branch tend to unite congressional Republicans and Democrats like little else.

In 2006, when the F.B.I. searched the Capitol Hill office of Representative William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, for evidence of corruption, his most vocal defender was a Republican, Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, who said the raid was a violation of the Constitution’s protection of congressional speech and debate.

“The Senate is bigger than any one senator,” said Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, trying to rally lawmakers behind Ms. Feinstein.

“The members of the Senate must stand up in defense of this institution, the Constitution and the values upon which this nation was founded,” he said.

Eric Schmitt and Charlie Savage contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Conflict Erupts in Public Rebuke on C.I.A. Inquiry. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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