Under fire from the White House, ousted US Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill on Tuesday denied he took secret documents to back up his criticisms of the Bush administration over Iraq and other issues.
Democrats pounced on O'Neill's questions on the timing and justification for the US-led invasion of Iraq, with presidential contender Wesley Clark and US Representative Charles Rangel of New York calling for a congressional investigation into the administration's rationale for the war.
On Monday, less than 24 hours after O'Neill criticized Bush on the CBS program 60 Minutes, the Treasury Department said it had asked its Inspector General to investigate how a document marked "secret" was shown during the interview.
A spokesman for the Inspector General said the probe would go ahead. He declined to discuss the scope of the investigation but said that at any one time "dozens" of such inquiries might be underway.
Speaking on NBC's Today show, O'Neill said the documents were given to him by the Treasury's chief legal officer after he requested them to help journalist Ron Suskind write a book on O'Neill's time in the Cabinet.
"I said to him [the general counsel] I would like to have the documents that are OK for me to have. About three weeks later, the general counsel, the chief legal officer, sent me a couple of CDs, which I frankly never opened," said O'Neill, who resigned under pressure a year ago in a shake-up of Bush's economic team.
O'Neill said he had given the compact disc with the documents to Suskind.
"I don't honestly think there is anything that is classified in those 19,000 sheets," said O'Neill, adding only the cover sheet shown on television bore the words "secret."
Stinging from the first attack by a major Bush insider, the administration worked to downplay O'Neill's comments that depicted a disengaged president and an administration focused on toppling Saddam Hussein from its earliest days.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he called O'Neill twice about the book but did not ask him to refrain from writing it.
Rumsfeld said he had not read the book but what he had heard about it was "so different from my experience in this administration. It is just dramatic. It's night and day."
Rumsfeld said he had "enormous respect" for Bush, "his brain, his engagement, his interest, his probing questions, his constructive and positive approach to issues."
Suskind's book about O'Neill's two years as Treasury Secretary, The Price of Loyalty, which went on sale on Tuesday, depicts Bush as a bullying, passive and superficial president surrounded by right-wing ideologues.
The former Treasury Secretary said in the book that early in his presidency Bush decided to put Middle East peace efforts on the back burner, saying at one point that more bloodshed might be "the best way to get things back in balance."
O'Neill said Bush initially gave him the nickname Pablo. Later he started calling him "Big O."
O'Neill viewed this as "a bully technique. `I've given you a name. Now you wear it.'"
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