The Justice Department’s threats to prosecute journalists for publishing classified information prompted a powerful senator to declare yesterday that Congress may need to pass legislation to address the issue.

“I believe that’s an invitation to the Congress to legislate on the subject because we do decide whether criminal prosecutions will be brought. That is clearly our authority and we’re now on notice as to what we need to consider,” the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Senator Specter of Pennsylvania said during a hearing yesterday. “Clearly, the ball is in our court.”

Mr. Specter, a Republican, made the comments while sparring with a witness who is a senior official in the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Matthew Friedrich. He repeated comments Attorney General Gonzales made last month in which he said it was possible that journalists could be charged under criminal statutes restricting the transmission of information relating to the national defense or to electronic intelligence programs.

“The department has consistently taken the position with respect to those particular statutes that they do not exempt a class of professionals, any class of professionals, including reporters, from their reach,” Mr. Friedrich told the committee. He noted that in the Pentagon Papers case decided by the Supreme Court in 1971, Justices White and Stewart said such prosecutions could be constitutional.

Mr. Friedrich insisted that the Justice Department is sensitive to free press concerns and has directed most of its attention to determining which public officials may have leaked classified data. “Our primary focus is on the leakers themselves,” he said.

“Primary focus leaves latitude for a secondary focus,” Mr. Specter observed.

“It would,” Mr. Friedrich said quietly.

Mr. Specter grew irritated when Mr. Friedrich declined to say whether prosecutors have actually considered indicting journalists for their role in publishing classified information. “I don’t even understand your point in declining to answer whether the Department of Justice has ever considered it,” the senator said.

When Mr. Friedrich began to allude to historical examples, Mr. Specter shot back, “I’m not interested in history this morning. I’m interested in current events.”

The ranking Democrat on the committee, Senator Leahy of Vermont, also chafed at Mr. Friedrich’s reticence. “Why in heaven’s name were you sent up here,” he said, according to the Associated Press. “Are there any questions you guys are allowed to answer other than your title, time of day?”

Senators expressed concern about a number of recent Justice Department actions, including an attempt by the FBI to gain access to the papers of a syndicated columnist who died in December, Jack Anderson. FBI agents told Anderson’s family that there might be classified materials in the files. Investigators told a journalism professor that the information was needed as part of an investigation into the receipt and dissemination of classified information by former staffers at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Two former lobbyists with the group, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, have pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from the probe and are set to go on trial in August.

Most of the Judiciary Committee members who tend to be in close step with the Bush administration were absent from yesterday’s hearing.

The committee also heard yesterday from a conservative writer and editor who has argued that the New York Times and one of its reporters, James Risen, be prosecuted criminally for disclosing a National Security Agency program to intercept telephone calls and e-mails coming into and out of America that may involve people affiliated with Al Qaeda.

“Our country is now at war,” a senior editor of Commentary magazine, Gabriel Schoenfeld, said as he told the panel that prosecuting the Times and Mr. Risen would be justified because they violated a 1950 law that bars disclosure of information about signals intelligence. He said the Chicago Tribune’s publication in 1942 of a story which indicated that America had broken Japanese naval codes led Congress to pass the measure.

“It carved out this one area of communications intelligence for special protection,” Mr. Schoenfeld said. He scoffed at the FBI’s efforts in the Anderson case but said the agency should step up its efforts to investigate other recent leaks. “There are other leaks that have been far more damaging that the FBI is not pursuing with any seriousness at all,” the editor said.

Mr. Specter said he was not convinced that any legislation passed by Congress was aimed at putting journalists in criminal jeopardy for publishing stories based on classified information. “It’s highly doubtful in my mind that that was ever the intent of Congress,” he said.

In a related development, an international organization devoted to freedom of the press, Reporters Without Borders, yesterday described as “untenable” the legal landscape for journalists in America. The Paris-based group faulted the Supreme Court’s decision Monday not to consider a case involving five reporters held in contempt in connection with a lawsuit brought by a nuclear scientist named as a suspect in an espionage investigation, Wen Ho Lee. News organizations agreed last week to pay $750,000 to resolve the dispute.

Reporters Without Borders said Congress should enact a federal law to protect journalists from being required to give testimony in most cases.