The feud between the Bush administration and its maverick former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill took another turn when the agency said it was at fault for giving him documents with classified information.
The Treasury Department had ordered a probe into how O'Neill a document marked "secret" was shown on the screen during a television interview broadcast last month in which he fiercely criticized his old boss President George W. Bush
"The Treasury Department recognizes that those documents were not properly reviewed before their release," Treasury Secretary John Snow said in a letter to various committee leaders on Capitol Hill.
Mr O'Neill, who resigned under pressure in December 2002, likened Mr Bush at cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people" and criticized his approach to Iraq in a book written by former Wall Street Journal reporter Mr Ron Suskind.
The Treasury Department's inspector general is probing how a cover sheet document marked "secret" appeared in a television interview with Mr O'Neill on January 11, raising the question of whether Mr O'Neill had improperly taken secret papers.
Mr O'Neill denied he had taken secret documents. "I don't honestly think there is anything classified in those 19,000 sheets," O'Neill said in a televised interview.
According to the book, Mr O'Neill approached the department in March 2003 and asked for copies of "every document that had crossed his desk" while he had been in office. In the book, Mr Suskind said, "They stretch from memoranda to the President to hand-scribbled thank-you notes, from minutes of meetings to hundred-page reports."
On Thursday, the book's publisher, Simon and Schuster, posted key documents on the Internet, at http://thepriceofloyalty.ronsuskind.com.