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By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey has signaled in his first weeks on the job that he intends to be a forceful advocate for some of President Bush’s most controversial antiterrorism policies, even if that means angering Congressional leaders who hoped that he would instead focus on repairing the strained relationship between the Justice Department and Capitol Hill.

In what was billed as a major policy speech on Wednesday to a panel of the American Bar Association, Mr. Mukasey suggested that lawmakers who opposed legislation before Congress to broaden eavesdropping powers — and to offer legal protection for telephone utilities that cooperate — were undermining the ability to deal with terrorist threats.

“We’ve seen what happens when terrorists go undetected,” he said. “We have to do everything possible within the law to prevent terrorists from translating their warped beliefs into action. To stop them, we have to know their intentions, and one of the best ways to do that is by intercepting their communications.”

He used the speech to step up the call for telephone utilities to have legal immunity for their past cooperation with the eavesdropping without warrants by the National Security Agency.

In recent days, Mr. Mukasey has also upset Congressional Democrats by saying he would refuse to share information about the Justice Department’s investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction of tapes of the interrogation of top figures of Al Qaeda.

Mr. Mukasey wrote in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that he was only following tradition in declining to reveal “nonpublic” information to Congress about a potential criminal investigation.

He also rebuffed early calls from Congress for the appointment of a special prosecutor in the inquiry.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the panel, said Wednesday that the letter “evidences none of the commitment to work with this committee that we heard during the attorney general’s recent confirmation hearings” and that it showed “no appreciation for the oversight role of Congress.”

Mr. Leahy said he feared that the attorney general, who took office on Nov. 9, was already part of “an effort to prevent accountability and to undermine checks and balances.”

Mr. Leahy made his comments at a hearing to review the nomination of a federal judge from Chicago, Mark R. Filip, for deputy attorney general, the No. 2 job at the Justice Department.

Judge Filip, whose nomination Congress will vote on when it returns from its year-end recess, drew criticism over his testimony that echoed Mr. Mukasey in refusing to say whether the technique called waterboarding was torture.

“Speaking personally, I consider waterboarding to be repugnant as it’s been reported in any of its various iterations,” Judge Filip testified. “That said, the attorney general of the United States is presently reviewing that legal question. He determined that he wanted to have access to the classified information and memos about it.

“I don’t think I can or anyone who could be potentially considered to be his deputy could get out in front of him on that question while it’s under review.”

Judge Filip was rebuked by some Democrats, including Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, who noted how the waterboarding question had cost Mr. Mukasey the support of senators who might otherwise have backed his nomination.

Mr. Mukasey’s nomination was approved by the narrowest majority of any attorney general in more than 50 years.

“And that’s where you find yourself at this moment, over the same issue,” Mr. Durbin told Judge Filip.

Although Mr. Mukasey has promised to ease tensions between Congress and the Justice Department arising during the tenure of predecessor, Alberto R. Gonzales, there is limited evidence of a new spirit of cooperation with Capitol Hill.

Democrats have praised a few of Mr. Mukasey’s early decisions, including his announcement this week of formal rules to limit discussions about criminal cases between the Justice Department and the White House, an area of contention under Mr. Gonzales.

The new rules generally limit those conversations to the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, the White House counsel and the deputy counsel.

Department officials acknowledged that Mr. Mukasey had little to do with other actions that were initially seen as conciliatory toward Democrats, including the transfer to Washington of the United States attorney in Minneapolis, whose performance Democrats and Republicans alike had strongly criticized.

In his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Mukasey said he continued to believe that there was a “positive collaborative process between Congress and the executive branch” over eavesdropping, “and we’ll continue to work closely with Congress to put these needed authorities on a permanent footing.”

The White House and Mr. Mukasey are pressing Congress to approve bills to make permanent a broad expansion of the National Security Agency’s wiretapping and eavesdropping and provide legal protection to phone utilities.

On Monday, Senate Democrats announced that they would put off any vote on the measures until next year, a setback for the administration.

Mr. Mukasey said it was crucial that the utilities have immunity from suits that accuse them of violating customers’ privacy rights and that ask them for billions of dollars in penalities.

“We simply cannot afford to discourage the private sector from helping us to detect and prevent the next terrorist attack,” he said. “Such companies deserve our gratitude, not litigation.”