President Barack Obama's nominee to be general counsel of the Central Intelligence Agency indicated at her confirmation hearing Tuesday that she opposes giving members of Congress access to Justice Department legal memoranda that govern CIA activities such as interrogation and drone strikes. 
 
 The nominee who rebuffed Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, Caroline Krass, has served as a top lawyer in the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel and at times as the acting director of that office. 
 
 Feinstein opened her questioning of Krass by asking her if she would commit to sharing OLC opinions with the Senate panel. 
 
 "This isn't just idle curiousity. It is really to understand the direction and rules under which certain programs operate," Feinstein said. "We have found that these opinions are actually indispensable to effective oversight." She said that an inspector general report found the CIA waterboarded 9/11 suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a manner inconsistent with the OLC opinion on waterboarding. 
 
 Krass responded initially by saying she was committed to making sure senators on the panel understood the legal framework CIA is working in, but she stopped short of committing to share the written opinions. 
 
 "I do believe the committee needs to fully udnerstand the legal basis for any activities, intelligence acitvities, in which the CIA is engaged, including covert action," Krass said. 
 
 Feinstein was unsatisfied and pressed Krass for a "yes or no" answer on access to the opinions. What the senator got sounded pretty much like a "no." 
 
 "The OLC opinions represent predecisional, confidential legal advice that’s been provided. Protecting confidentiality of that legal advice preserves space for their to be a full and frank discussion among clients, policymakers and their lawyers within the executive branch and really furthers the rule of law and allows for effective functioning of the executive branch," Krass said, repeating her offer to help the committee understand the administration's legal thinking and saying she has "an almost unique ability to do that." 
 
 "I think we do understand it," Feinstein replied. "I think it has been explained to us but every OLC opinion has been a fight to obtain and we have obtained very few of them, only those that relate to U.S. citizens." 
 
 Feinstein didn't immediate explain what she meant, but she may have been referring to a battle the committee had earlier this year to get opinions on targeting terrorism suspects for deadly force in drone attacks. The confirmation of CIA Director John Brennan was held up for a time until President Barack Obama agreed to share legal memos on the subject with Congressional committees. 
 
 Joining Feinstein, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said she was "troubled" by Krass's answer. Collins noted that the Office of Legal Counsel often releases unclassified opinions. 
 
 "They go through an extensive review process....We try to publish opinions when we can to promote transparency," Krass said, before saying there would be some merit to considering that for classified legal opinions. "I do think it's worth exploring whether there could be some kind of similar process with respect to classified OLC opinions." 
 
 Pressed by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), Krass said she does not believe Congress has a right to Office of Legal Counsel opinions. 
 
 "I do not think so, as a general matter," she said. 
 
 Last month, the Justice Department pressed a federal appeals court to preserve the Office of Legal Counsel's ability to keep legal opinions from the public. 
 
 Collins also raised a 2011 episode in which Obama rejected a legal interpretation advanced by Krass and the Pentagon's top lawyer at the time, Jeh Johnson, which would have curtailed U.S. operations in Libya. Obama sided with his White House counsel and State Department lawyers in deciding to continue the operation. 
 
 In an indirect way, Collins suggested Krass might have quit if she thought what the president proposed doing was illegal. 
 
 "What I don't like seeing is the administration shopping around until it gets a legal opinion with which it agrees and that seems to have happened in the case of Libya," Collins said. 
 
 UPDATE (Tuesday, 4:05 P.M.): This post has been updated with the exchange with Levin. 
 
 Read more about: Transparency, Justice Department, Senate Intelligence Committee, Office Of Legal Counsel, Central Intelligence Agency, Caroline Krass, Legal Opinions ||||| “If this is true,” Mr. Udall said during a hearing on the nomination of Caroline D. Krass to be the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, “this raises fundamental questions about why a review the C.I.A. conducted internally years ago — and never provided to the committee — is so different from the C.I.A.’s formal response to the committee study.” 
 
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 The agency responded to the committee report with a vigorous 122-page rebuttal that challenged both the Senate report’s specific facts and its overarching conclusions. John O. Brennan, one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers before taking over the C.I.A. this year — and who denounced the interrogation program during his confirmation hearing — delivered the agency’s response to the Intelligence Committee himself. 
 
 It is unclear what the agency specifically concluded in its internal review. 
 
 Mr. Udall, whose public criticisms of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone data has raised his profile in Congress and won him praise from privacy advocates, said he would not support Ms. Krass’s nomination until the C.I.A. provided more information to the committee about the interrogation program. 
 
 Ms. Krass did not respond directly to Mr. Udall’s statements about the internal C.I.A. review. Dean Boyd, an agency spokesman, said the agency was “aware of the committee’s request and will respond appropriately.” 
 
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 Mr. Boyd said that the C.I.A. agreed with a number of the conclusions of the voluminous Senate investigative report, but found “significant errors in the study.” 
 
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 “C.I.A. and committee staff have had extensive dialogue on this issue, and the agency is prepared to work with the committee to determine the best way forward on potential declassification,” he said. 
 
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 Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is the Intelligence Committee’s chairwoman, said recently that her committee would soon vote to adopt the report’s executive summary and conclusion, which would then be subject to a formal declassification process before it was publicly released. 
 
 Republican members of the committee, angry about what they see as a biased and shoddy investigation by their Democratic colleagues, are planning to make public a rebuttal of their own. 
 
 The Senate report, which took years to complete and cost more than $40 million to produce, began as an attempt to document what was perhaps the most divisive of the Bush administration’s responses to the Sept. 11 attacks. But it has since become enmeshed in the complex politics of the Obama administration. 
 
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 President Obama ended the detention program as one of his first acts in the Oval Office, and has repeatedly denounced the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods under the program. During a speech in May, he said that the United States had “compromised our basic values by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.” 
 
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 And yet Mr. Obama has repeatedly resisted demands by human rights groups to seek prosecutions for the lawyers who approved the interrogation methods or the people who carried them out, and the White House has been mostly silent during the debate over the past year about declassifying the Senate report. 
 
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 For all his criticisms of the counterterrorism excesses during the Bush administration, Mr. Obama has put the C.I.A. at the center of his strategy to kill militant suspects in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere. 
 
 Human rights groups have tried to pressure the White House to intervene to get the Senate report declassified. 
 
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 “Whether it’s stalling or concealing, the C.I.A. is trying to avoid reckoning with its past abuse,” said Naureen Shah of Amnesty International USA. “And that’s what makes declassifying the Senate’s report so crucial right now.” 
 
 Ms. Krass is a career government lawyer who works at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the arm of the department that advises the White House on the legality of domestic and foreign policies. 
 
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 The office was particularly controversial during the Bush administration, when lawyers there wrote lengthy memos approving C.I.A. interrogation methods like waterboarding and sleep deprivation, as well as signing off on the expansion of surveillance by the National Security Agency. 
 
 Under Mr. Obama, the office has approved other controversial practices, including the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric living in Yemen who was an American. Mr. Awlaki was killed in September 2011 by a C.I.A. drone strike, launched from a secret base in Saudi Arabia. 
 
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 Much of Tuesday’s hearing was consumed by a debate about whether the White House should be forced to share Justice Department legal memos. 
 
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 Under polite but persistent questioning by members of both parties, Ms. Krass repeatedly said that while the two congressional intelligence committees need to “fully understand” the legal basis for C.I.A. activities, they were not entitled to see the Justice Department memos that provide the legal blueprint for secret programs. 
 
 The opinions “represent pre-decisional, confidential legal advice that has been provided,” she said, adding that the confidentiality of the legal advice was necessary to allow a “full and frank discussion amongst clients and policy makers and their lawyers within the executive branch.” 
 
 Senator Feinstein appeared unmoved. “Unless we know the administration’s basis for sanctioning a program, it is very hard to oversee it,” she said. 
 
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 Still, it is expected that the committee will vote to approve Ms. Krass.
– The Senate Intelligence Committee has formally requested a classified internal CIA study on its torture program, which lawmakers believe is deeply unflattering, the New York Times reports. Mark Udall revealed the existence of the report yesterday during a prickly hearing with Caroline Krass, President Obama's nominee for CIA general counsel. The Senate is fighting to declassify its own 6,300-page report on torture, which reportedly castigates the program. The CIA has blocked and vigorously rebutted that report, but lawmakers think its secret internal report backs it up. Krass didn't respond directly to Udall's questions about the report yesterday, and Udall says he won't support her nomination until the CIA opens up about torture. He might not be her only detractor, either. The real drama in yesterday's hearings came when Dianne Feinstein pressed Krass on whether she'd release the Justice Department legal memos used to justify practices like torture and drone strikes. Krass was evasive at first, but ultimately replied, "I do not think so, as a general matter," arguing that the memos were "confidential legal advice," the Guardian and Politico report. "You are going to encounter some heat in that regard," Feinstein warned.