Setting the stage for a constitutional battle, the Spitzer administration today said it would fiercely resist a legislative inquiry into the scandal surrounding the governor’s office use of state police to discredit the Republican majority leader of the Senate, Joseph Bruno.

“Any new Senate hearings on this same issue would be a complete waste of state taxpayer dollars for purely partisan and political purposes,” a spokeswoman for the governor, Christine Anderson, said in a statement. “Moreover, the state Senate lacks the constitutional authority to conduct investigatory hearings into the internal operations of the governor’s office.”

Senate Republicans have indicated they would launch hearings and call senior members of the Spitzer administration, and perhaps the governor himself, to testify about their knowledge of a plot to use state police to try to dig up damaging information about Mr. Bruno’s use of air and ground security escorts.

Mr. Spitzer, who suspended his communications director, Darren Dopp, and demoted his liaison to state police, William Howard, has insisted that he and his chief of staff, Secretary Richard Baum, were misled by Mr. Dopp and that they did not know that the administration had directed the acting police superintendent, Preston Felton, to keep track of Mr. Bruno’s whereabouts. Details of the plot against Mr. Bruno were disclosed in a report issued this week by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s office.

“If there are cover-ups, the public has a right to know what has been covered up,” Mr. Bruno said, speaking to reporters at Saratoga Springs, the Associated Press reported. He said the governor’s office “has seen fit to abuse the power of that office to spy and track and attempt to really destroy what apparently the governor’s office considers a political rival,” according to the Associated Press.

The Legislature is armed with subpoena power that it could use to uncover damaging e-mails and other records not disclosed in the attorney general’s report.

The chairman of the Senate committee on investigations and government operations, George Winner, today sent a letter to Mr. Cuomo, asking him to “provide information constituting the basis of your report. Specifically, I would appreciate your making available to the Committee copies of the statements and depositions you have taken as part of your investigation, as well as copies of any e-mail messages which were reviewed during your investigatory process.”

A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo’s office did not return calls for comment.

Mr. Spitzer suspended Mr. Dopp and demoted the liaison, Mr. Howard, insisting that his administration fully cooperated with the investigation, that nobody else in his office had acted inappropriately, and pointing out that the Mr. Cuomo’s had determined that no crime had been committed.

The scheme was detailed by a report released on Monday by the attorney general’s office, which said administration officials planned to plant in the press a negative story about Mr. Bruno’s transportation to fundraisers in New York City. State police recreated some records and took extraordinary measures to monitor Mr. Bruno’s whereabouts under the direction of a liaison to state police in the governor’s office who was in contact with Mr. Dopp.

Messrs. Dopp and Baum both refused to speak to investigators but provided sworn statements. Mr. Baum, who has worked closely with Mr. Spitzer for almost a decade, said in his statement said he did not direct anybody to create, re-create, or maintain records relating to Mr. Bruno, but he did not say whether he was aware that such orders to the police had been given.

View State Senator George Winner’s letter to Attorney General Andrew Cuomo