An argument about a secret congressional committee's ability to review the US intelligence agencies exploded into rare public view on Tuesday as angry senators demanded legal memos from a nominee to run the CIA's legal office.

Caroline Krass, a top justice department lawyer, sparked the ire of several Senate intelligence committee members by claiming that crucial legal opinions about intelligence matters were beyond the scope of the committee.

Asked directly and repeatedly if the Senate panel was entitled to the memos, which several senators claimed were crucial for performing their oversight functions, Krass replied: "I do not think so, as a general matter."

Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the committee, suggested that Krass placed her nomination as CIA general counsel in jeopardy. "You are going to encounter some heat in that regard," Feinstein said.

The Senate intelligence committee, whose public hearings are increasingly rare, is usually a bastion of support for the CIA and its sister intelligence agencies. The exception is the committee's prolonged fight with the CIA over a 6,300-page report on the agency's torture of terrorism detainees in its custody since 9/11.

The committee has prepared its report for years; the former chairman, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, said the classified version contains 50,000 footnotes. For a year, the panel has sought to release a public version that multiple members of the panel say documents both the brutality of CIA torture and what they have called "lies" told by the CIA to the oversight committees in Congress and the rest of the executive branch concerning its torture practices.

CIA director John Brennan, who was a senior CIA official during the years scrutinised by the committee, is resisting release of the report. The CIA has told reporters that the report contains numerous factual errors, which Senator Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat on the panel, said on Tuesday was a "misleading" and self-serving description of differences of "interpretation" between the agency and the committee. "I'm more confident than ever in the factual accuracy" of the torture report, Udall said.

The panel said at the hearing that the CIA is stalling on the provision of documents to the committee that will help it complete its work. Krass, a former White House official who worked alongside Brennan there, did not assure the committee she would help provide them.

Krass said the general counsel of the CIA had a "duty and obligation to make sure the committee understands the legal basis" for CIA activities. She worried that disclosure of the legal memos themselves would inhibit the executive branch from candidly discussing policy proposals for fear of embarrassing public disclosure.

Several senators found Krass's statement insufficient. Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who has investigated torture while serving on the Armed Services Committee as well, asked if the committee was "entitled" to the opinions as a matter of oversight.

Krass said her "caveated answer" was, "I do not think so, as a general matter."

It is unclear if the committee will reject Krass's nomination. But the two-hour exchange highlighted the difficulties the intelligence committees can face in getting basic factual information from the intelligence agencies they are tasked with overseeing.

Those difficulties carry over to the ongoing controversy about the NSA's bulk surveillance activities, Udall and his colleague Ron Wyden of Oregon have charged. But they are the only dissenters on a committee that has been stalwart in favour of the NSA, even as the committee is feuding with the CIA.

Feinstein got Krass to say she disagreed with a federal judge's opinion on Monday that the NSA's bulk surveillance of US phone data was likely unconstitutional. Krass, who would have a limited ability to oversee that program at CIA but likely has insight into it through her Justice Department role, disputed Judge Richard Leon's assessment that such constitutional protections surround that data.

"I have a different view about the Fourth Amendment," Krass said.

Feinstein said she agreed with Krass, but said no one on the committee wished to contravene the constitution, urging the Supreme Court to settle the issue.