WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A computer used by Paula Broadwell, the woman whose affair with CIA director David Petraeus led to his resignation, contained substantial classified information that should have been stored under more secure conditions, law enforcement and national security officials said on Wednesday. 
 
 The contents of the classified material and how Broadwell acquired it remain under investigation, the officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to comment publicly. 
 
 But the quantity of classified material found on the computer was significant enough to warrant a continuing investigation, the officials told Reuters. 
 
 President Barack Obama told a news conference on Wednesday there was no indication so far that any classified information had been disclosed as a result of the scandal. 
 
 Obama also said he would refrain for now from judging whether he should have been told earlier than last Wednesday about the probe involving his CIA chief. 
 
 "I am withholding judgment with respect to how the entire process surrounding General Petraeus came up. We don't have all the information yet," Obama told a White House news conference. 
 
 The president noted that had he known earlier, he might have been open to accusations of interference in a politically sensitive law enforcement matter. 
 
 As a reserve officer in military intelligence, Broadwell - co-author of a biography on Petraeus - had security clearances that gave her access to classified material, several officials said. Government rules require such material to be stored in secure locations or computers. 
 
 Two officials familiar with the case said that one question investigators are asking was whether Broadwell followed government rules for handling classified information. 
 
 Late Monday, FBI investigators searched Broadwell's residence in Charlotte, North Carolina, an action that officials said occurred with Broadwell's consent. 
 
 Attempts to reach Broadwell, who has remained mainly out of the public eye, have been unsuccessful. She was seen late Tuesday at her brother's home in Washington, D.C. 
 
 During the FBI investigation that led to the discovery of the affair between Petraeus and Broadwell, both individuals denied that Petraeus had supplied her with any classified information and the FBI accepted those explanations, law enforcement sources have said. 
 
 CRIMINAL CHARGES UNLIKELY 
 
 Law enforcement officials also have said that they believe the continuing FBI probe into the matter is likely to end without criminal charges. If Broadwell is found to have mishandled classified information, she could face action under administrative security regulations. 
 
 Still, the latest developments could quash hopes among some at the Justice Department and in Congress for a quick end to a scandal that this week also ensnared the commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Marine General John Allen. 
 
 Petraeus has made no public statement since he announced his resignation as CIA chief on Friday. 
 
 The retired four-star Army general has agreed, however, to testify to Congress about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, amid questions over the CIA's actions before, during and after the assault on September 11, 2012. 
 
 Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein said Petraeus was willing to testify about the Benghazi attack but the timing had not yet been decided, a spokesman for the California Democrat said. 
 
 U.S. lawmakers demanded on Wednesday to know more about the timeline of the FBI's probe into Petraeus' affair with Broadwell. 
 
 Representative Lamar Smith, the Texas Republican who heads the House Judiciary Committee, wrote FBI Director Robert Mueller asking for both a timeline and whether Petraeus is the focus of a criminal probe. 
 
 There is no protocol in federal law that would have required senior officials - such as Mueller or Attorney General Eric Holder - to inform the president about the Petraeus investigation sooner, a former Justice Department official said. 
 
 The most recent written guidance was issued in 2007 by Michael Mukasey, then the attorney general. The Justice Department should advise the White House about a criminal matter "only where it is important for the performance of the president's duties and where appropriate from a law enforcement perspective," the memo reads. It leaves interpretation of those terms to the attorney general and the deputy attorney general. 
 
 "It's the quintessential judgment call for an attorney general to decide whether to share this information and when to share it with the White House," the former official said. "But this was Attorney General Holder's call to make." 
 
 Earlier on Wednesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, speaking in Perth, Australia, warned against jumping to conclusions over the actions of Allen, a day after placing him under investigation in connection with the Petraeus scandal. 
 
 Allen, who denies any wrongdoing, is being investigated for potentially inappropriate communications with Jill Kelley, a Florida socialite who is at the center of the Petraeus case. 
 
 PRAISE FOR ALLEN IN AFGHANISTAN 
 
 Panetta defended his decision to refer the case to the Pentagon's inspector general, but praised Allen's work as Afghanistan commander, a position he retains despite the probe. 
 
 "No one should leap to any conclusions here," Panetta said. "He certainly has my continued confidence to lead our forces and continue the fight." 
 
 Defense officials and people close to Petraeus say neither he nor Allen had a romantic relationship with Kelley, a 37-year-old wife and mother who is described as a prominent presence in military circles in Tampa. 
 
 She may have been seen as a rival by Broadwell, who sent Kelley a series of anonymous, harassing emails which touched off an investigation that uncovered evidence of an affair between Petraeus and Broadwell, according to a law enforcement source. 
 
 Allen and Kelley communicated often enough over the past two years to produce between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of email and other messages, which were turned over to Defense Department investigators on Sunday. 
 
 A senior defense official told Reuters the messages were seen as inappropriate because they were "flirtatious" in nature, not because they dealt with sensitive information. 
 
 But another U.S. official said the Pentagon only decided to refer the matter for investigation after an initial look found the communications to be of "a sufficient character" to warrant further review. 
 
 (Additional reporting by Phil Stewart in Australia, Patrick Rucker, David Alexander, Rick Rothacker, David Ingram, Tabassum Zakaria, Susan Cornwell, Matt Spetalnick, Margaret Chadbourn and Dan Burns. Writing by Warren Strobel. Editing by David Lindsey, Dan Burns and Cynthia Osterman) ||||| David H. Petraeus, the former CIA director and a retired four-star general, receives a plaque of appreciation at the University of Southern California after making his first public speech since resigning as the agency’s director. The Los Angeles event was a dinner honoring veterans and ROTC students. 
 
 March 26, 2013 David H. Petraeus, the former CIA director and a retired four-star general, receives a plaque of appreciation at the University of Southern California after making his first public speech since resigning as the agency’s director. The Los Angeles event was a dinner honoring veterans and ROTC students. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images 
 
 The ex-CIA director gives his first public speech since leaving the agency and apologizes for his extramarital affair. 
 
 The retired four-star Army general who commanded forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has resigned from the head of the CIA, citing an extramarital affair. 
 
 The retired four-star Army general who commanded forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has resigned from the head of the CIA, citing an extramarital affair. 
 
 FBI agents searched the home of the woman at the center of the scandal involving former CIA director David H. Petraeus on Monday evening, carrying away boxes and bags of material and taking photographs inside her home in Charlotte. 
 
 A senior law enforcement official said the agents were searching for any classified or sensitive documents that may have been in the possession of Paula Broadwell, a former military officer and Petraeus biographer whose extramarital affair with him led to his resignation Friday. 
 
 Local television stations showed agents carrying boxes out of the two-story brick house Broadwell shares with her husband, a radiologist, and two young sons. Agents also appeared to be taking photographs inside the house. 
 
 Broadwell has not been seen at the home or commented since the news of Petraeus’s resignation broke Friday. On Monday, she hired a prominent Washington defense lawyer, Robert F. Muse. 
 
 The search was the latest chapter in the story of Petraeus’s fall from grace. It came on the same day that two longtime military aides to Petraeus said that he did not intend to resign until it became clear that his extramarital affair with Broadwell would become public after the first phase of the FBI investigation of his e-mail accounts. 
 
 While investigating complaints from a woman in Tampa that Broadwell had sent her threatening e-mails last summer, the FBI discovered explicit e-mail exchanges between Petraeus and Broadwell that exposed their affair. The investigation also raised questions about whether Broadwell may have possessed classified material, and the search Monday night was related to that, the senior law enforcement official said. 
 
 “I don’t think it’s a game changer,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on an ongoing investigation. “It was done to resolve things with a greater level of confidence.” 
 
 In a farewell letter last week to CIA staff members, Petraeus ­described his affair with Broadwell as behavior that is “unacceptable both as a husband and as the leader of an organization such as ours.” The statement and others from his allies in the days that followed created an impression that he had stepped down of his own volition, and out of a sense of moral obligation. 
 
 But some of his closest advisers who served with him during his last command in Iraq said Monday that Petraeus planned to stay in the job even after he acknowledged the affair to the FBI, hoping the episode would never become public. He resigned last week after being told to do so by Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. on the day President Obama was reelected. 
 
 “Obviously, he knew about the relationship for months, he knew about the affair, he was in it, so yes, he was not going to resign,” said Peter Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and Petraeus’s executive officer during the Iraq “surge,” who spoke Monday with the former general for about half an hour. “But once he knew it was going to go public, he thought that resigning was the right thing to do. There is no way it would have remained private.” 
 
 Steven Boylan, who served as Petraeus’s public affairs officer during that same period in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, said the retired four-star general “felt he had to [resign] once he knew it would be made public. He didn’t feel he could lead the organization with this being out there.” 
 
 A more detailed timeline of the events that upended the career of one of the nation’s most accomplished military officers emerged from interviews with former Petraeus advisers, people close to Broadwell, law enforcement officials, and people close to Petraeus family friend Jill Kelley, who received harassing e-mails from Broadwell. 
 
 The new information shows that Petraeus told Broadwell this summer to stop sending the harassing e-mails after Kelley told him about them. Law enforcement officials said the e-mails indicated that Broadwell was jealous of Kelley’s friendship with Petraeus. His warning came about the same time Petraeus ended the affair with Broadwell. 
 
 The intrigue grew early Tuesday when the Pentagon announced it was investigating between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of documents — most of them e-mails — that contain “potentially inappropriate” communication between Kelley and Gen. John R. Allen, who succeeded Petraeus as the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan. 
 
 A senior defense official told reporters traveling to Australia with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that the Pentagon was still reviewing the e-mails and declined to comment on the nature of the relationship between Allen and Kelley. 
 
 In an interview Monday, Kelley’s brother said his sister, a volunteer military liaison in Tampa who is friends with Petraeus and his wife of 38 years, Holly, had no idea that her complaint to the FBI would lead to the end of Petraeus’s career. There are still unanswered questions about the sequence of events. Over the weekend, Kelley hired Washington lawyer Abbe Lowell and Broadwell hired Muse. Both lawyers have declined to comment. 
 
 Although Petraeus has left his post and his biography has been removed from the CIA Web site, congressional leaders continued Monday to demand that he be prepared to testify in a hearing this week on the events surrounding the Sept. 11 attack on a U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. 
 
 Petraeus met Broadwell in 2006 at Harvard, where she was a graduate student writing a dissertation on leadership. They began corresponding, and when he moved to Tampa in 2009 as head of the U.S. Central Command, she became a frequent visitor. 
 
 At the same time, Petraeus and his wife became friends with Kelley and her husband, Scott. They attended parties with the Kelleys, and Jill Kelley spent time at the military base as a volunteer. Petraeus’s posting was cut short when Obama tapped him in June 2010 to become commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan after Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal was forced to resign. 
 
 Broadwell, a West Point graduate like Petraeus who had spent more than a decade as an Army officer before leaving, visited him several times for extended stays. She had decided to turn her dissertation into a biography of the general, which was published this year as “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus.” 
 
 Several of Petraeus’s aides said they were surprised — and concerned — by how much access the general granted Broadwell during her visits. But Mansoor and others say the affair began only after Petraeus left the military in mid-2011 to become CIA director. 
 
 “It began as a mentor-mentee relationship,” Mansoor said. “At some point, it morphed into a more personal relationship. But the physical aspects of the relationship happened a couple months after he got to the agency.” 
 
 Beyond the military, the two shared an interest in fitness and the study of leadership. When they were apart, e-mail served as their communication method of choice, with hundreds of mes­sages passing between them through various and sometimes anonymous accounts. 
 
 By late spring of this year, however, the relationship appeared headed for trouble. 
 
 In Tampa, Kelley began receiving a series of what she described to a friend as bizarre e-mails from an anonymous account. They did not specifically cite Kelley’s connection to Petraeus but warned that her advances toward him would have to stop or she would be exposed. Associates of Petraeus and Kelley have said they have been nothing more than social friends. 
 
 “They attended events together. They spend Christmas at each other’s homes,” Boylan said. “There was nothing untoward. No affair-like thing between them. They were strictly friends.” 
 
 Kelley was alarmed enough by the e-mails that in June she told a friend who worked as an FBI agent in Tampa about them. The agent took her concerns to the bureau, where investigators traced the messages to Broadwell. 
 
 In examining her e-mail account, investigators found messages from Petraeus of a highly personal nature. The FBI suspected the communications were being sent by someone who had hacked into the CIA director’s personal account. 
 
 The mistake apparently came in part from steps Petraeus and Broadwell took to conceal their relationship. According to the Associated Press, instead of sending e-mails to each other’s accounts, the two composed the messages and then left them in a “draft” folder where they could be accessed with a shared user name and password. The method, often used by terrorists, makes it harder to trace e-mail traffic. But in this case, it may also have fueled law enforcement concerns that a hacker was accessing the accounts. 
 
 The FBI informed Kelley that Broadwell was the sender and Kelley said she did not know her, according to a person close to Kelley. 
 
 At some point this summer, Kelley told Petraeus about the e-mails and named Broadwell as the person who had sent them. Apparently in response, the CIA director sent e-mails to Broadwell telling her to stop the harassment, two law enforcement officials said. 
 
 Mansoor, who during his last tour in Iraq spent 15 months in a bedroom adjacent to Petraeus’s, said the affair ended four months ago. That roughly coincides with the time Petraeus discovered that Broadwell was sending the ­e-mails to Kelley, although Mansoor would not say who ended the relationship. 
 
 “This is someone who spent his entire career in the military, and he is used to having people around him who have shared bonds and experience,” Mansoor said. “He had that with her, and she made herself available to him.” 
 
 When confronted by FBI agents about the e-mails, Broadwell, 40, acknowledged the affair and turned over her computer. Petraeus, 60, also acknowledged the relationship in his interview with the FBI. 
 
 Kelley’s brother said that his sister dined and shopped regularly with Holly Petraeus, and that she had no idea her complaint would eventually reveal an extramarital affair. David Khawam, a lawyer in New Jersey, said his sister called him Sunday and told him to turn on the news, which featured her role in the unfolding investigation. 
 
 “I’ve done nothing wrong,” Khawam said his sister told him. “I’m the victim here. But it still feels awful.” 
 
 In late summer, the FBI informed senior Justice Department officials about the case. A department spokeswoman, Tracy Schmaler, declined to say when Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was informed. 
 
 After reviewing the investigation, federal prosecutors decided there was no evidence that warranted charges against Broadwell or Petraeus. The senior law enforcement official said Monday night that the case remains open. 
 
 Broadwell was interviewed the week of Oct. 21, and Petraeus was interviewed on Oct. 29. During his interview, he was told that he would not be charged and the FBI did not suggest that he resign, law enforcement officials said. 
 
 What remains unclear is why, after it was decided that criminal charges would not be filed, the FBI informed Clapper about the investigation. Another question is why the notification was made on Election Day about a case the Justice Department had declined to pursue weeks earlier. 
 
 At some point during the summer, the Tampa FBI agent whom Kelley had first approached for help was taken off the investigation. Frustrated and concerned that an inquiry into what he thought may be a possible national security breach had not progressed, he got in touch with the office of Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.). Reichert passed the information on to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). 
 
 “I was contacted by an F.B.I. employee concerned that sensitive, classified information may have been compromised and made certain Director Mueller was aware of these serious allegations and the potential risk to our national security,” Cantor said in a statement. 
 
 Cantor contacted FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III on Oct. 31, and a week later Clapper told Petraeus he needed to resign. 
 
 “I don’t know if it would have taken this course without Cantor,” a person close to the inquiry said. 
 
 Karen DeYoung, Carol D. Leonnig, Julie Tate and Greg Miller contributed to this report.
– Prosecutors are recommending felony charges against David Petraeus for allegedly divulging classified information to an old mistress, unnamed officials tell the New York Times. Now it's Eric Holder's call to either heed the FBI and Justice Dept advice or risk the perception of special treatment for the retired four-star general. The story goes back to 2012, when Petraeus retired as CIA director in the wake of his affair with Army Reserve officer Paula Broadwell. An investigation found classified documents on her computer and evidence that she had access to his private CIA email account. Petraeus denies divulging any classified information, and says he would refuse a plea deal. As the case dragged on, FBI and Justice officials questioned whether Petraeus was getting special treatment. A federal official tells NBC News that the Times leak is meant to pressure Holder, who was expected to decide on charges by the end of last year. President Obama has supported the ex-general, saying in 2012 that there was no proof Petraeus had leaked information "that in any way would have had a negative impact on our national security." So will the storied military man, who commanded US forces in Iraq in 2007 and again in Afghanistan in 2010, go on trial? So far, it's hard to get quotes on the record. "I can't say," said FBI Director James Comey when asked about the investigation. "I mean, I guess I could say, but I won’t say."