(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-03-21 09:04

WASHINGTON -- A battle over Hillary Rodham Clinton's record as first lady broke out on two fronts Thursday, as a federal judge stepped into a dispute over the handling of still-unreleased Clinton phone logs and Barack Obama's campaign challenged her record on trade.

The latest twist in the debate over her time in the White House came in the courtroom of US District Judge James Robertson, who forced the National Archives to undergo questioning about why it won't release 20,000 pages of Clinton's old phone logs.

Democratic presidential candidate Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) addresses her supporters during a campaign stop in Charleston, West Virginia March 19, 2008. [Agencies]

Not enough resources, a lawyer representing the National Archives told the judge.

Not a good enough explanation, ruled Robertson, who was appointed to federal court by President Clinton in 1994. Robertson granted a conservative group's request to question at least one National Archives official on why the agency handles some requests more promptly than others.

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The archives deals with requests for documents on UFO sightings while letting the former first lady's records languish at the former president's library in Little Rock, Ark., complained Paul Orfanedes, head of the litigation department at Judicial Watch, the organization suing the archives for Clinton documents.

The National Archives wants to delay consideration of the Clinton phone logs for a year, then decide when it will start the six- to eight-month process of reviewing them for possible public disclosure.

It was the second straight day of wrangling over old Clinton documents.

On Wednesday, the National Archives placed on the public record more than 11,000 pages of Clinton's daily schedules from 1993 to 2000.

Obama's presidential campaign and its supporters used the newly released material to build a case that Clinton hasn't been truthful about her position on the North American Free Trade Agreement. She was an early champion of the agreement that she now criticizes as a candidate for president.

Her schedules show her holding at least five meetings in 1993 aimed at helping to win congressional approval of NAFTA.

"Senator Clinton likes to say on the campaign trail that she's always been a critic of NAFTA," said Obama supporter Roger Tauss, international vice president of the Transport Workers Union. "The only thing I find more disappointing than her supporting NAFTA in the '90s is she can't tell the truth about it to this very day."

This is the "political equivalent of consumer fraud. And she owes an apology to the people of Ohio and an explanation to the people of this country," said Obama senior strategist David Axelrod

Now that parts of her schedules have finally been released to the public, "we know that one thing that she was hiding was the truth," Obama communications director Robert Gibbs said.

Clinton spokesman Phil Singer countered that it is Obama who can't be trusted.

"Senator Obama said that he would not engage in personal attacks," said Singer. "Now, after losses in Ohio and Texas, the Obama campaign is explicitly attacking Senator Clinton's character."

Singer said independent accounts make clear that Clinton did not support NAFTA and that "she is the candidate Americans can trust to fix it." Singer referred to previous statements by former White House adviser David Gergen, who said the first lady "was extremely unenthusiastic about NAFTA. And I think that's putting it mildly."