WASHINGTON (AP) — A fight between the Senate and the CIA over whether crimes were committed in the handling of sensitive classified material appears unlikely to be resolved in the courts, legal experts say.

The simmering dispute erupted in public this week when Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., accused the CIA of improperly searching and removing documents from a computer network used by Senate investigators to compile a report on the George W. Bush-era interrogation program for suspected terrorists. CIA Director John Brennan has denied that the CIA hacked into the computers but says an audit was necessary to determine whether Senate staffers had improperly obtained sensitive CIA documents.