Beginning on the day he was sworn in, Attorney General Gonzales routinely ignored regulations concerning the storage of highly classified documents, including several that dealt with the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program, a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general concluded yesterday.

The Justice Department’s national security division will not be making a criminal case against the former attorney general out of the matter, the report by the inspector general, Glenn Fine, said.

Other former high-ranking government officials caught mishandling classified material — including a former national security adviser, Samuel Berger, who hid classified documents under a trailer in downtown Washington — have faced charges but rarely jail time.

“The approach they seem to have taken with Gonzales is not inconsistent with the approach they’ve taken with other mishandling” of classified document cases involving top government officials, a lawyer in Los Angeles, Marc Harris, who is representing a former Boeing engineer awaiting sentencing for taking classified documents home from work, said.

The inspector general’s report focuses on a single document: handwritten notes by Mr. Gonzales about the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program. The secret nature of the NSA program, the report concludes, meant that the notes required storage in a “specially constructed room” complete with sensors to detect intruders.

Instead, immediately following his swearing in, the handwritten notes spent at least a night in his briefcase in his home office at his Virginia residence, the report concludes.

Mr. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel for President Bush prior to becoming attorney general in 2005, resigned as attorney general last year amid questions about why several U.S. attorneys had been fired.

The handwritten notes that Mr. Gonzales brought home with him contained his recollections of a March 10, 2004, meeting between Bush administration officials and congressional leaders that had been called to discuss the future of the National Security Agency’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, which involves wiretaps without court warrants. While much of the notes detail the reactions of lawmakers, about three paragraphs contain highly classified information, the report stated. Mr. Gonzales said he had been asked by President Bush to write up notes about the meeting.

On February 3, 2005, the day of his swearing in, Mr. Gonzales moved the notes with him to the Justice Department from the White House Counsel’s office. At the Justice Department that day, he received a briefing that included a PowerPoint presentation on how to properly store classified information. Then he took the notes home with him that night, the report said.

When Mr. Gonzales eventually brought the notes back to work, he stored them within two envelopes inside a safe that was situated several steps from his desk. The report says this itself is a violation of department regulations, because the safe Mr. Gonzales used was not intended for storage of such highly classified documents.

The report states that the notes should have been handled in a special storage facility, called a Sensitive Compartmented Storage Facility, which is built for information that is classified above Top Secret.

Mr. Gonzales “regrets this lapse, noting, however, that while it does not excuse the use of proper procedures, he undertook these steps without conscious disregard of the requirements for handling and storage of classified information,” a lawyer for the former attorney general, George Terwilliger, wrote in a memo to the Justice Department.

“He believed that this safe was a sufficiently secure location for notes of a sensitive nature, and that this safe was also the most secure location to which he had immediate personal access,” the memo said.

The report does not claim that Mr. Gonzales’s handling of documents ever led to unauthorized persons learning classified information. But it does state that Mr. Gonzales’ decision to store the in the office safe meant that two assistants to Mr. Gonzales may have physically handled Mr. Gonzales’s handwritten notes about the program while reviewing the safe’s contents when Mr. Gonzales was away, the report concludes.

The investigation was prompted by a complaint from the White House counsel’s office, the report said. The report does not say which official in the counsel’s office initiated the allegations.

The investigation began about two weeks after the current White House counsel, Fred Fielding, met with Mr. Gonzales in July 2007 to “discuss his handling of the notes” and the procedures he used for storing such highly classified information, the report states.

Earlier, Mr. Gonzales had volunteered to Mr. Fielding that he had notes about the March 10, 2004, meeting on the NSA program but that he wasn’t sure where they were, according to the report, which says Mr. Fielding was interviewed.

Mr. Gonzales apparently thought the notes would interest to Mr. Fielding because of testimony by a former deputy attorney general, James Comey, about a rift in the Bush administration about the legality of the NSA program.

The report also concludes that there were 17 other highly classified documents that Mr. Gonzales improperly stored in the office safe.

The report notes that Mr. Gonzales had forgotten or never knew the combination to a government-installed safe in his own home.