The guilty plea is part of an agreement with the Justice Department, the paper said, adding that Berger should plead guilty in federal court in Washington, D.C. by Friday, "capping an embarrassing episode that reverberated in last year's presidential campaign."

Berger was once thought to be a serious candidate for secretary of state in a John Kerry administration. He was even an informal adviser to the Democratic presidential candidate, until news broke that he allegedly improperly removed classified documents – on two occasions – from the National Archives. He quit the Kerry campaign shortly thereafter.

The documents pertained to a terrorist assessment from 2000, before George W. Bush took office. Specifically, they dealt with an "after-action" report detailing the Clinton administration's response to so-called millennium terrorist threats – a highly secret assessment that was, according to some reports, less than stellar.

For one thing, the report was compiled by Richard Clarke, the same counterterrorism czar under Clinton and President Bush who criticized the latter's handling of intelligence prior to 9/11.

Only, writes Byron York, the White House correspondent for the National Review, "Clarke apparently concluded that the millennium plot was foiled by luck — a border agent in Washington State who happened to notice a nervous, sweating man who turned out to have explosives in his car — and not by the Clinton administration's savvy anti-terrorism work."

Furthermore, Berger admitted – after National Archives personnel noticed he was pilfering documents – that he had hidden some handwritten notes in his jacket and pants pockets, in order to sneak them out, NR reported last July.

"Any notes made from classified material have to be cleared before they can be removed from the Archives — a common method of safeguarding classified information — and Berger's admission that he hid the notes in his clothing is a clear sign of intent to conceal his actions," York wrote. (Editor's Note: The Times article has no mention of this additional information, only that Berger "now admits to misleading the archive about what had happened.")

Why would Berger cob documents from the National Archives? Wouldn't a national security adviser know how sensitive such documents are, and how closely guarded they must remain? An unnamed "associate" explained his behavior to the Times: "He was just too tired and wasn't able to focus enough, and he felt like he needed to look at the documents in his home or his office to line them up. He now admits that was a real mistake, which he regrets."

Editor's note: