As part of a routine disposal of documents, Hillary Rodham Clinton ordered the destruction of four files in 1988 from her work on the failing savings and loan that's now at the heart of the Whitewater affair.

According to newly released documents, the files describe her work just two years earlier for Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan, and three of them dealt with the first lady's work on the Castle Grande land development that Senate investigators and federal regulators are now probing.In written responses to regulators released Thursday, Hillary Clinton said she did not initiate the destruction, but that she earmarked the documents for disposal after the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, Ark., issued a request for all lawyers to identify files they no longer needed.

The Madison files were among a large amount of material on a number of former clients that the first lady designated for disposal.

Hillary Clinton vigorously defended her conduct in Whitewater and the 1993 firing of White House travel office aides during a one-hour appearance on "CBS This Morning."

"It is not a legal issue," she said. "It is at bottom a partisan issue."

She also said her account of Whitewater has been bolstered by the recent discovery in the White House of billing records from her former law firm.

"Those documents help me. They support what I've been saying," she said.

The destruction of the Madison files was the second disclosure of the day regarding documents on the first lady's work for the S&L.

A longtime Clinton aide, Carolyn Huber, told the Senate Whitewater Committee that billing records of Hillary Clinton's work for Madison mysteriously appeared on a table in the White House residence last August - two years after investigators subpoenaed them. Huber didn't realize what they were until she examined them this month, she testified.

The first lady on Friday flatly denied that either she or the president put the documents on the table.

"Of course not," she replied when asked if she or Clinton had placed the papers there.

President Clinton, in an interview Thursday with U.S. News and World Report, said people on their way to the White House gym routinely walked through the room where the billing records were found.

"That's where if we had things like gifts or toys, or things we didn't have a place to store, they were put in there," Clinton said. "It was just all kinds of stuff crammed in there. And I don't think there was even an attempt to try to sort through what was there or not . . . until some of the people who were typing Hillary's book started working there in the fall."