Former Treasury secretary given sensitive documents

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill received 140 sensitive documents that should have been marked classified, the Treasury Department's inspector general said Monday -- but while the report found the department's review system for classifying documents needed improvement, no federal laws were broken.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Associated Press and other news outlets, the Treasury Department's inspector general released several hundred pages covering its investigation of how O'Neill received about 19,000 documents he shared with writer Ron Suskind, who wrote a book highly critical of President Bush.

The new report found 140 of those documents had not been marked classified, even though they contained sensitive but unclassified information.

"Had these 140 documents been properly marked as classified, the documents would not have been entered into Treasury's unclassified computer system, and O'Neill would not have received them," the report said.

Treasury launched an investigation into the documents in January after CBS's "60 Minutes'' showed a document marked "secret" during an interview.

O'Neill was fired on Dec. 6, 2002, after Bush decided to shake up his economic team.