Judge wants archives' answer on Clinton logs

WASHINGTON - A federal judge yesterday stepped into a dispute over the handling of still-unreleased phone logs from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's years as first lady.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson ruled that the National Archives must undergo questioning about why it will not release 20,000 pages of Clinton's logs. An archives attorney cited a shortage of resources.

Not a good enough explanation, Robertson ruled. He granted a request by the conservative group Judicial Watch to question at least one archives official on why the agency handles some requests more promptly than others.

The archives deals with requests for documents on UFO sightings while letting Clinton's records languish at her husband's presidential library in Little Rock, contended Paul Orfanedes, head of the litigation department at Judicial Watch, which is suing the archives for the documents.

The 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.

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

- AP

Sen. Barack Obama began his day yesterday by doing a telephone interview from West Virginia with Philadelphia's 610 WIP. Angelo Cataldi, host of the radio station's morning show, asked him about his Tuesday speech on race at the National Constitution Center - and about the candidate's references to how his white grandmother sometimes gave voice to stereotypes that made him cringe.

"The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity; she doesn't," the Illinois senator said. "But she is a typical white person who, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know, there's a reaction that's been bred into our experiences that doesn't go away and sometimes comes out in the wrong way.

"And that's just the nature of race in our society," he said. "We have to break through it."

- Larry Eichel

WASHINGTON - Republican Sen. John McCain's campaign has suspended a staffer who sent out a provocative video linking Sen. Barack Obama to the comments of his spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The staffer, a low-level aide named Soren Dayton, sent out a link yesterday to the YouTube video, titled "Is Obama Wright?", on the social messaging Web site Twitter. The campaign suspended him a few hours later, though it would not say for how long.

"We have been very clear on the type of campaign we intend to run, and this staffer acted in violation of our policy," campaign spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said.

The Politico, a Washington-based newspaper, reported that the two-minute video was the work of Lee Habeeb, a former producer of the

Laura Ingraham Show

, a conservative talk program. In the video, Wright's most incendiary remarks are mixed with snippets from Obama speeches and interviews, which are edited to make the senator seem to be sputtering and unpatriotic.

- AP