In remarks on the Senate floor yesterday regarding the judicial nomination of Miguel Estrada, Senator Clinton said, “They won’t release the documents. I have to question the reasons why the information is not forthcoming. This administration has compiled quite a record of secrecy. That bothers me.”

The issue here is attorney-client privilege — specifically, Mr. Estrada’s advice to the White House. A bipartisan group of former solicitors general wrote a letter to Senator Leahy in 2002. “Our decision-making process required the unbridled, open exchange of ideas,” the letter said,”an exchange that simply cannot take place if attorneys have reason to fear that their private recommendations are not private at all.”

Mrs. Clinton has some experience in this. When Vince Foster, deputy White House counsel early in the Clinton administration and a former attorney to Mrs. Clinton, committed suicide in 1993, the Clintons claimed attorney-client privilege in trying to keep investigators from looking into Foster’s files for documents related to Whitewater. Later, the White House resisted turning over to prosecutors notes from conversations that government lawyers had with Mrs. Clinton, again related to Whitewater. The Clinton White House, on the same grounds, also resisted an effort by Kenneth Starr to subpoena Francis Carter, an attorney who advised Monica Lewinsky.

The attorney-client privilege is an important one, and we support it now as we did in the Clintons’ cases. Mrs. Clinton would be wise to preserve it now in case some day she finds herself again at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.