Alberto Gonzales Discusses The Release of Records

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Each of you works for an agency that has a designated records official. You should contact that official to determine what the record policies are for your agency.

Congress made a deliberate choice that not every document created by you in connection to your duties should be released to the public. You should check with your records official to determine which of the documents should in fact be released and which of the documents should be preserved.

For example, certain types of documents related to litigation, documents that may implicate the privacy act, deliberative documents are all types of documents that Congress has determined can be preserved by the agency in order to ensure that the agency functions the way that it should on behalf of the American people.

That was then, this is now

A classified State Department memorandum central to a federal leak investigation contained information about CIA officer Valerie Plame in a paragraph marked "(S)" for secret, a clear indication that any Bush administration official who read it should have been aware the information was classified, according to current and former government officials.

Further in we find this notation

Anyone reading that paragraph should have been aware that it contained secret information, though that designation was not specifically attached to Plame's name and did not describe her status as covert, the sources said. It is a federal crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, for a federal official to knowingly disclose the identity of a covert CIA official if the person knows the government is trying to keep it secret.