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Ron Wyden Is Pissing Off the NSA’s Biggest Backers. Tom Cotton Warns There Will Be “Consequences.”

Debate over a secret court opinion involving the Trump administration’s use of data collected by the NSA turned personal.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., keeps getting under the skin of the NSA’s biggest supporters with his warnings about intelligence agency abuses — and the latest dispute resulted in a high-profile dustup on the Senate floor on Thursday.

Wyden said the public needs to know about a secret court opinion that found fault with the Trump administration’s use of data collected by the National Security Agency, prompting Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to warn of “consequences” for “distorting highly classified material.”

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The unusually pointed back-and-forth came amid a fight over the reauthorization of a controversial domestic spying program. The barbs exchanged by the senators highlighted how much Wyden has angered colleagues aligned with the NSA who want the spy program to be renewed without changes.

By the end of the day, Congress voted to give the program a 45-day extension to allow further negotiations over its fate.

Wyden had argued for a shorter extension, but he was able to secure a concession. Cotton and the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, agreed to pen a letter to the executive branch asking for the court opinion to be declassified within 15 days.

Wyden says that opinion details serious violations of the program’s guidelines.

“That ruling found serious violations of Americans’ constitutional rights and how the Trump administration has used Section 702,” Wyden said. “Congress should not vote — should not vote — to renew Section 702 when Americans are left in the dark about these troubling abuses,” Wyden said.

Wyden has a long history of trying to pry loose evidence of civil liberties violations by intelligence agencies. Most famously, in 2013, he attempted to force then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to acknowledge the existence of a phone record dragnet months before NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures made it public.

His sometimes-cryptic statements warning about secret spy programs........

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