Today saw a flurry of fracases in the longstanding e-mail fight between Gov. Matt Blunt and Attorney General Jay Nixon.

When we left the duo a few weeks ago, Nixon’s staff was sending over copies of thousands of office e-mails to comply with Blunt’s record request.

Today, Blunt’s staff contended that the documents “showed that Nixon had no specific e-mail retention policy of his own.  Nixon only implemented a specific e-mail retention policy on January 1, 2008, months after he launched political attacks against the governor’s office on the issue, more than a month after he appointed political operatives to attack the governor’s office on e-mail retention and 15 years after he became Attorney General.”

The Missouri GOP soon followed with a similar missive.

 As regulars know, Nixon appointed in November the investigative team that has attempted to probe the handling of e-mails in the governor’s office. The team was set up, in part, in response to a former Blunt lawyer who contends that he was fired for raising concerns that the governor’s staff was failing to properly retain e-mails in order to avoid complying with open-records requests. The lawyer, Scott Eckersley, has since filed suit.

The investigative team  filed suit in May, accusing the governor’s office of failing to turn out copies of e-mails and backup tapes sought by the team.

The team also alleged in the suit, according to our story, that “Blunt’s top aides ordered state employees to break the law by destroying copies of government e-mails so they wouldn’t ever become public…”

Today, Nixon granted the investigative another extension – until Aug. 29 – to complete its probe. The team had been slated to end its work and file a report on Friday; it says it can’t do so because of the suit.

This afternoon, Nixon spokesman Scott Holste blasted the latest attack from Blunt and Mo GOP, which he said “illustrates that they don’t understand the role of the state records commission.”

Holste said that Nixon’s office has sent over to Blunt’s staff, several times, copies of the state record-retention schedule for Nixon’s office. That schedule has been followed since Nixon took office in 1993, Holste said.

He cited a supplemental retention policy put in place for Nixon’s office in 1994.

What was sent out on Jan. 1, Holste said, was “a document management policy. It is not a retention policy. We’ve always followed the records retention policy” set by the state commission for the attorney general’s office.