Yesterday, the final nail was placed in the coffin of the White House myth that Congress saw the same prewar intelligence as President Bush. A Congressional Research Service report found that the Bush administration had access “to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information, including information regarding intelligence sources and methods.”

But today, when asked about the CRS report, Scott McClellan pushed the same spin on “same intelligence”:

MCCLELLAN: We provide the Congress a lot of intelligence information, and they did have access to the same intelligence that we saw prior to making the decision to go into Iraq.

In fact, even the White House admits this isn’t true. As McClellan went on to acknowledge a moment later, Congress did not have access to the Presidential Daily Briefs (the intel summaries President Bush receives each morning). The White House says this fact is irrelevant, however, because those briefs were found to be even “more alarmist” and “less nuanced” than the intelligence Congress had:

MCCLELLAN: I saw there’s a reference to the Presidential Daily Brief, where the Silberman-Robb commission already addressed that issue and said that, if anything, that the Presidential Daily Brief was less nuanced than the intelligence that members of Congress saw and that we saw as well.

McClellan is ignoring the elephant in the room: the CRS report states that the discrepancies in intelligence access went far beyond the PDBs, and included “the identities of intelligence sources,” the “methods” used to gather and analyze intelligence, and the “raw” intelligence. Congress never had access to any of this information.

Poor Scottie, clinging to the “same intelligence” myth like a security blanket. Let it go, Scottie. You’ll be okay.

President Bush “personally authorized a secretive eavesdropping program in the United States more than three dozen times since October 2001, a senior intelligence official said Friday night.”

Yesterday, the final nail was placed in the coffin of the White House myth that Congress saw the same prewar intelligence as President Bush. A Congressional Research Service report found that the Bush administration had access “to a far greater overall volume of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information, including information regarding intelligence sources and methods.”

But today, when asked about the CRS report, Scott McClellan pushed the same spin on “same intelligence”:

MCCLELLAN: We provide the Congress a lot of intelligence information, and they did have access to the same intelligence that we saw prior to making the decision to go into Iraq.

In fact, even the White House admits this isn’t true. As McClellan went on to acknowledge a moment later, Congress did not have access to the Presidential Daily Briefs (the intel summaries President Bush receives each morning). The White House says this fact is irrelevant, however, because those briefs were found to be even “more alarmist” and “less nuanced” than the intelligence Congress had:

MCCLELLAN: I saw there’s a reference to the Presidential Daily Brief, where the Silberman-Robb commission already addressed that issue and said that, if anything, that the Presidential Daily Brief was less nuanced than the intelligence that members of Congress saw and that we saw as well.

McClellan is ignoring the elephant in the room: the CRS report states that the discrepancies in intelligence access went far beyond the PDBs, and included “the identities of intelligence sources,” the “methods” used to gather and analyze intelligence, and the “raw” intelligence. Congress never had access to any of this information.

Poor Scottie, clinging to the “same intelligence” myth like a security blanket. Let it go, Scottie. You’ll be okay.

domestic surveillance program. “‘There is no doubt that this is inappropriate,’ declared Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He promised hearings early next year.”

The Ohio congresswoman who called Jack Murtha a “coward” says she “got a round of applause at a recent closed-door meeting” of House conservatives. She’s also received marriage proposals: “It’s amazing. There have been three marriage proposals and lots of dates. They think I’m a hottie,” she said.

Wednesday on Fox News, President Bush said that he believed Tom DeLay was innocent of money laundering:

HUME: Do you believe he is innocent?

BUSH: Delay? Yes, I do.

The comment caused considerable controversy because the White House has been deflecting comments about the CIA leak for months, claiming it’s their policy not to comment on ongoing criminal investigations.

ThinkProgess has obtained an advanced transcript of Bush’s upcoming interview on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. In it, Bush claims he only meant that DeLay was presumed innocent until proven guilty:

MR. LEHRER: You don’t know. Okay. The–you mentioned Tom Delay. Why did you say he was innocent?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I was””

MR. LEHRER: This is an interview with Brit Hume.

PRESIDENT BUSH: I did and–but the point I was making was innocent till, until otherwise proven, and I was also asked did I hope he would come back to Congress. The answer was yes.

MR. LEHRER: But you–I looked very carefully at that transcript. I mean, you essentially said he was innocent. I mean, you weren’t–that wasn’t–you weren’t really saying that then? You were just saying he’s presumed innocent?

PRESIDENT BUSH: I–that’s exactly what I was saying.

Bush didn’t make a mistake by violating White House policy. We just misinterpreted what he was saying. Got it?

Senate rejects pleas from President Bush and filibusters legislation to renew the Patriot Act. “The Senate fell seven votes short of shutting off a filibuster that threatens to block an extension of much of the law.”

“After 25 years of serving as a CNN commentator and program host, our colleague Bob Novak’s tenure on the network will come to a close (effective 12/31),” said Jon Klein, president of CNN/U.S. Apparently viewer feedback works.

UPDATE: Novak heading to Fox (Turns out our commentors were right.)

The New York Times reports today that soon after 9/11, “President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.”

Who provided the legal justification to spy (perhaps illegally) on Americans without judicial oversight? None other than former Justice Department official John Yoo. It’s not the first time Yoo has advised the administration to push moral, legal and ethical boundaries:

Yoo Argued Interrogation Wasn’t Torture Unless It Resulted In Organ Failure or Death: Yoo also wrote an infamous torture memo which argued that interrogation techniques only constitute torture if they are “equivalent in intensity to…organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” The Bush administration was forced to repudiate that memo once it became public. Yoo continues to defend it, saying the new torture definition “makes it harder to figure out how the torture statute applies to specific interrogation methods.”

Yoo Argued President Bush Didn’t Need To Ask Congress Before Invading Iraq: Yoo has also argued that “President Bush didn’t need to ask Congress for permission to invade Iraq.” The 1973 War Powers Resolution, according to Yoo, is “irrelevant.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice echoed the argument when she told a congressional committee that “the president has the right to attack Syria, without congressional approval, if he deems that a necessary move in the war on terror.”

Yoo Argued Geneva Conventions Do Not Apply to Detainees: Thanks to Yoo’s legal work, the Bush administration justified the creation of a new category of detainees: “illegal enemy combatants.” “Yoo and other Administration lawyers began advising President Bush (after 9/11) that he did not have to comply with the Geneva Conventions in handling detainees in the war on terror,” the New Yorker reported earlier this year.

Although Yoo is now a law professor, his views remain influential in the Bush administration. Maybe it’s time to stop taking his advice.