The latest in the White House email follies:

Karl Rove’s lawyer says that he didn’t mean to delete his emails. He thought the RNC was keeping a copy. Just one big misunderstanding.

The White House now says that it may have lost millions of emails due to switching from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook.

M.J. Rosenberg in top form: whether David Brooks and the neocons like it or not, most “Arab anger about (and sympathy for) Palestinians is utterly genuine.”

Ya don’t say?

From the document dump, DOJ press spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos on strategy for dealing with the Attorney Purge story: “We are trying to muddy the coverage up a bit.”

More from the Justice Department documents:

Turns out that the Justice Department under Bush does pay close attention to who’s a member of the Federalist Society and who’s not.

And the Justice Department has said that no replacements were ready for the fired U.S. attorneys. But today’s documents show that Kyle Sampson had a list.

In episode #3 of our new TPM TV show, we discussed those DOJ emails in which Justice Department officials are caught brainstorming cover stories for why they fired San Diego US Attorney Carol Lam. And today’s document dump contains even more fun.

In one memo, apparently assembled by Monica Goodling, the DOJers get so creative that they get confused about which fired US Attorney they’re talking about — Lam, Iglesias, you say Tomato, I say Tomahto. (As you know, the Iglesias was bad on illegal immigration cover story is soo down the memory hole.) And in her zeal to get on Lam’s case for lax immigration enforcement in a prep memo for senate testimony, Goodling blames Lam for enforcement policies actually run by the Department of Homeland Security.

The plan to blame her for America’s dependence on foreign oil doesn’t seem to have made it into the emails. But we’re still looking …

Kyle Sampson’s lawyer explains away the latest Kyle Sampson contradiction.

What it’s looked like from the very beginning.

From NPR (courtesy of TPM Reader DE) …

NPR now has new information about that plan. According to someone who’s had conversations with White House officials, the plan to fire all 93 U.S. attorneys originated with political adviser Karl Rove. It was seen as a way to get political cover for firing the small number of U.S. attorneys the White House actually wanted to get rid of. Documents show the plan was eventually dismissed as impractical.

Why do you think they’re tossing everyone under the bus but Karl?

I told a reporter a week or so ago that the turning point in my mind in the US Attorney story came the day we saw the report in Joe Monohan’s New Mexico politics blog that David Iglesias had sent an email in which he had called his firing a “political fragging.” That was the first time we had a hint of the real story out of one of the fired attorneys’ mouths. And it looked like there was more coming. The next day he told McClatchy how two members of Congress had called him to pressure him about that election timed indictment.

That set off the alarm bells at the White House and we have the email in which Karl Rove’s deputy Scott Jennings sends out an urgent message to Rove, Fielding, Perino, Sampson, et al.

Jennings had gotten an urgent call from Steve Bell, Sen Domenici’s Chief of Staff. “Bell said Domenici’s idea is not to respond, and hopefully make this a one day story,” Jennings tells the gang.

Good luck.

Definitely check this one out.

Also, a side note. New White House Counsel Fred Fielding has been laying a lot of the blame for the lax email policies on his predecessors. But here we have Jennings sending out a group email that includes both Fielding and Rove. And Rove’s getting it at one of his RNC email addresses. I guess it was still SOP as late as February 28th, the date of the email.

Whamo! Big Attorney Purge news out of Wisconsin. More shortly.

Big News.

In yesterday’s episode of TPM TV we discussed Milwaukee US Attorney Steven Biskupic and discussed the evidence suggesting he’d been targetted by the Justice Department for firing (he didn’t come through on ‘voter fraud’) but then apparently got a reprieve. Was it tied to his recently reversed corruption case, targetting a Democratic administration?

To remind you …

Well, tonight we have proof. Just out from McClatchy …

A U.S. attorney in Wisconsin who prosecuted a state Democratic official on corruption charges during last year’s heated governor’s race was once targeted for firing by the Department of Justice, but given a reprieve for reasons that remain unclear. A federal appeals court last week threw out the conviction of Wisconsin state worker Georgia Thompson, saying the evidence was “beyond thin.”

Congressional investigators looking into the firings of eight U.S. attorneys saw Wisconsin prosecutor Steven M. Biskupic’s name on a list of lawyers targeted for removal when they were inspecting a Justice Department document not yet made public, according to an attorney for a lawmaker involved in the investigation. The attorney asked for anonymity because of the political sensitivity of the investigation.

This will be big.