Wyden, Feinstein, Burr and Collins have encountered issues with the administration. | AP Photos Obama-Hill intel pipeline broken

The Senate’s spy watchdogs are abuzz over what lawmakers describe as a low point in relations with the Obama administration and its intelligence policymakers.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein has taken to the Senate floor and Sunday shows to denounce the administration for failing to communicate with Congress about the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and the alleged seizure of committee documents by the Central Intelligence Agency. News of the Bergdahl trade even took two days to reach the senator.


After saying her piece, Feinstein is fed up with the drama.

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Pressed about her relationship with President Barack Obama and his top aides, the California Democrat called the topic “bizarre” and advised a reporter to “take some castor oil.”

“This is about oversight and it’s not about popularity contests,” she said in an interview. “Wherever I go, that’s the question: ‘Has the White House called you? Well, why hasn’t the White House called you?’ I mean please, the White House has a lot of things to do.”

But the communications between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the White House on issues from Iraq, to the Bergdahl swap and the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs are a hot topic to Feinstein’s committee colleagues. Extensive interviews with 10 members of her panel in both parties revealed a flawed process that will require leaps of faith by both sides to repair.

Senior Intelligence Committee member Richard Burr (R-N.C.) guffawed when asked whether the administration’s information pipeline to the committee is broken.

“It’s nonexistent,” he said.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said the relationship is at an all time nadir. And Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) called the latest misstep on Bergdahl’s transfer “either outrageous, outrageous arrogance or total incompetence.”

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“The majority of us are together on this. … I think it’s the White House’s move” on picking up the pieces, Coats said.

Senators in both parties describe persistent difficulty in drawing information out of administration officials before and after controversial events — though some of the same members have skipped briefings or leaked information after a classified meeting, reinforcing the White House’s concerns over loose-lipped lawmakers.

“The [administration’s] intelligence leadership has again and again said one thing in public and another thing in private, creating what I think is a real culture of misinformation,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who dedicates considerable energy to forcing public disclosure of intelligence programs with widespread impact.

Asked about the Bergdahl transfer specifically, Wyden replied, “It didn’t help. Sen. [Jay] Rockefeller said look at the five of us who’ve been around a long time. Myself, Feinstein, Burr, [Sen. Saxby] Chambliss, everybody’s in the dark. That is not exactly a confidence builder.”

The White House has repeatedly argued that concerns over congressional leaks endangering Bergdahl largely drove the lack of congressional outreach.

“Discretion on this matter was important,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters.

Much of the panel remains concerned over its complicated relationship with the executive branch. The president and top White House aides are described as generally responsive, but lawmakers mentioned “unforced” errors that easily could have been avoided and a pattern of evasive answers from top intelligence figures — even in a classified setting.

The Bergdahl transfer and Obama’s decision to skirt a law requiring Congress be informed of the release of Guantánamo Bay detainees is just the latest pressure point in an increasingly tense relationship that took center stage in Washington when Edward Snowden leaked details of the NSA’s sweeping surveillance programs.

Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the Intelligence panel, was incredulous that nearly two weeks after Bergdahl’s release he was still learning information about Bergdahl from the front page of The Washington Post.

“I just found out Bergdahl got discharged from the Coast Guard. I read about it in the paper. We’ve had two classified briefings and I’ve had other briefings and they don’t tell us about that? There’s just no reason,” Chambliss said. “There’s not been any outreach on this subject, which bothers me considerably. Because they know my interest in it.”

Generally in an intelligence crisis, the White House would hastily arrange a briefing to the Republican and Democratic leaders in both chambers as well as top intelligence lawmakers in the House and Senate, including Feinstein and Chambliss.

That didn’t happen on Bergdahl, but Feinstein and others reported improved communications with White House officials as Iraq descended into chaos. Nearly as soon as news spread of Iraqi Army divisions folding in the face of militant insurgents, the White House quickly arranged briefings for the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees and had long been informing congressional leaders of the developments.

Feinstein spoke this week with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough about security matters and met with National Security Council officials — so in her view, any beef with White House has been quashed.

“Surprise, surprise,” she quipped of an uptick in communications with the administration that had largely left her hanging for a week on Bergdahl.

“The purpose is to make something out of nothing,” she warned of questions about their relationship. “There are a lot of things that are issues — this is not one of them.”

There is certainly a partisan hue to some complaints. While several Republicans on the Intelligence panel described their current relationship with the White House as the worst-ever during their long congressional tenures, Democrats uniformly disagreed.

That divide exposes the partisanship that has gradually infiltrated a committee whose goal is to be an apolitical overseer of intelligence policy.

But Democrats have their own issues with the Obama White House. Civil libertarians are agitating for more information on the NSA’s data-mining programs, Feinstein and committee Democrats are still battling with the CIA over the declassification of a report on the agency’s torture programs and the lack of congressional disclosure over Bergdahl’s transfer is sure to rattle around Capitol Hill for months.

Wyden considers former NSA Director Keith Alexander’s statement that the NSA doesn’t “hold data” on U.S. citizens “the most false statement that’s ever been made about U.S. surveillance,” and he’s been able to wring an apology out of National Intelligence Director James Clapper for saying the U.S. does “not wittingly” collect data on millions of Americans.

Now the wonky Oregonian is trying to assess the breadth of the intelligence communities’ email surveillance through pointed questions to the administration. It hasn’t produced unclassified results — yet.

“That’s a big deal. As communications become more globally interconnected, that’s only going to grow. There’s going to be more instances where Americans have their emails and communications swept up,” Wyden said. “People deserve a response to it. A real talk about what the extent is, what the checks are and how it works.”

Democrats are disappointed that they’ve found the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies under Obama as secretive as they were under George W. Bush. There’s always been tension between Congress and the administration on national security, but Democrats had hoped Obama would assist frustrated lawmakers who have been stonewalled for years.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), a former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman who is still a senior panel member, recalled returning from a classified intelligence briefing with the committee’s top Republican, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, during the Bush presidency.

“We were instructed, if you can believe this, not to talk to each other about what we’d just heard driving back. That’s the way they played it. They just didn’t want any dissent whatsoever,” said the retiring Rockefeller, who is mulling over spending his post-Senate life studying the frustrating relationship between Congress and the intelligence community.

Things have improved under Obama, Rockefeller said, but they’re not perfect.

“They make everything hard,” Rockefeller said of intelligence agencies. “The thing that kills you is you have to say un-nice things about them because they work their ass off.”

Some committee members are actively moving to patch things up.

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said he wants to convene informal discussions with administration officials and committee members in hopes of blowing off steam and clearing the air, while Wyden is developing better relationships with new administration officials.

“Admiral [and NSA chief Mike] Rogers took Keith Alexander’s place here recently and he came to see me and we had a very tough, direct conversation,” Wyden said, calling Rogers’ statements about growing distrust between the public and national security community “an acknowledgment that certainly his predecessor was unwilling to accept ever.

“It was always, you know, the American people don’t really understand it’s a dangerous world,” he said. “The American people and the committee understand how dangerous it is.”

And with the growing concern up and down Pennsylvania Avenue over the situation in Iraq, the second-guessing of the administration’s relationship with the committee may temporarily cease.

Senate Intelligence Committee member Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) is highly critical of the circumstances surrounding the Bergdahl swap and why Congress was left in the dark. But he said it’s time for unity.

“We should be asking for the White House to provide us a concrete plan that we can rally around in a bipartisan way, for the well-being and security of our country. It’s that serious,” he said. “There will come a time in the future to have any criticisms that we may have about improving our intelligence.”