The senior New York Republican declined to identify the specific committees, but said any probe would come before Berger was formally sentenced in July.

Questions continue to swirl about the five copies of a Millennium bomb plot after-action report stolen by Berger - focusing on why he cut three of those copies "into small pieces."

Berger defenders insist that documents he took contained no original notes in the margins.

"Those documents, emphatically, without doubt - I reviewed them myself - don't have notations on them," prosecutor Noel Hillman told the Wall Street Journal on Thursday.

But Hillman offered no explanation why Berger shredded three copies and not all five, returning the remaining two to the National Archives.

When news of Berger's theft broke last July, the Justice Department took a much tougher line - with Deputy Attorney General James Comey suggesting that it made no difference whether the documents Berger had stolen were originals.

"It is against the law for anyone to intentionally mishandle classified information, either by taking it to give to somebody else, or by mishandling in a way that is outside the regulations of government information," Comey told reporters at the time.

"All felonies in the federal system bring with them the promise of jail time," he added. Asked how Berger should be held accountable if the documents he destroyed contained any original material, Rep. King told Malzberg, "He should go to jail."

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