Wyden and Schiff say Trump team is breaking the law over a secret surveillance opinion

Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Adam Schiff of California fired off a letter Monday to Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and Attorney General Todd Blanche, accusing the administration of blowing past the legal deadline for declassifying a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion. That deadline came and went on Sept. 13, making the release more than a month late, according to a separate letter from the senators and a coalition of civil liberties groups to congressional leaders. Blanche had previously promised lawmakers the opinion would be declassified on time.

The missing opinion matters because it sits at the center of the fight over Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which lapsed this summer. Warrantless collection has continued anyway under a separate court ruling that runs through March of next year. Under Section 702, the government can warrantlessly sift foreign targets' calls and electronic messages using the personal data of Americans who crossed paths with them.

What's in the ruling is the sticking point. A judge objected to tools the government built to let analysts process messages, according to the outlet CyberScoop. The reported flashpoint was a filtering system that let analysts pull information in a way that should legally count as a query into Americans' data, which carries extra protections. Wyden has said the opinion reveals what he calls major compliance problems, and he has refused to back a short-term reauthorization until the administration coughs it up.

Wyden and Schiff argue lawmakers can't do their jobs in the dark. They wrote that Congress must be able to openly debate these abuses, warning that Americans will otherwise doubt a government that violates basic legal requirements can be trusted with a surveillance tool this powerful. In their own letter, the civil liberties groups went further, saying Congress should reject any reauthorization while the administration withholds the mandated information, and that Section 702 should only come back with a warrant requirement for accessing Americans' private communications.

The overdue release has also been flagged from inside the Senate Intelligence Committee. Its leaders said they expected declassification and release by May 15, another mark the administration has missed. A spokesperson for Vice Chairman Mark Warner said he and Chairman Tom Cotton urged then-DNI Tulsi Gabbard back in March to declassify the March 17 FISC opinion, per CyberScoop. Neither Gabbard nor Acting Director Bill Pulte responded, the spokesperson said, and Warner now expects Clayton to do it in line with the bipartisan committee letter and the law.

Cotton's office did not respond to a request for comment. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Justice Department also stayed quiet when CyberScoop asked. With collection authority still running through March, the clock on both the declassification and the reauthorization fight keeps ticking.