Bush's radio address this morning brought few surprises.

WASHINGTON - President Bush said Saturday that Democratic leaders in the House are blocking key intelligence legislation so trial lawyers can sue phone companies that helped the government eavesdrop on suspected terrorists after the Sept. 11 attacks. Terrorists are plotting new attacks against America "at this very moment," Bush said in renewing his call for the House to pass legislation needed to renew the intelligence law that expired last weekend.

And the AP stenographer somehow misses the fact that it was Bush and the Republicans in Congress who blocked key intelligence legislation and are continuing to do so by refusing to participate in the House/Senate conference on the bill. Oh, those pesky facts.

But, there are still some reporters on the job, exploring administration claims. Here's WaPo's Dan Eggen and Ellen Nakashima on yesterday's letter from Mukasey and McConnell on "lost intelligence." Eggen and Nakashima report:

The Bush administration said yesterday that the government "lost intelligence information" because House Democrats allowed a surveillance law to expire last week, causing some telecommunications companies to refuse to cooperate with terrorism-related wiretapping orders. But hours later, administration officials told lawmakers that the final holdout among the companies had relented and agreed to fully participate in the surveillance program, according to an official familiar with the issue.

In other words, Mukasey and McConnell lied in their letter to Congress. Again. Which leads Glenn to make this point:

But even if telecoms were refusing to cooperate, the reason for their refusal was not because they don't have retroactive immunity, but rather, it's because there is alleged uncertainty over the legality of current surveillance requests, and uncertainty over the ongoing validity of the prospective immunity provided by the PAA, because the PAA expired. If the PAA had been extended, they would be completely protected with prospective immunity for future surveillance cooperation. And, of course, the PAA would not have expired had Congressional Democrats had their way -- they wanted to extend it until they could agree to a new bill. Thus, any alleged refusal on the part of telecoms to cooperate is exclusively the fault of Bush and House Republicans for forcing expiration of the PAA. That's just true as a matter of basic logic. But leave all of that aside for a moment. Since Mike Mukasey himself just said in this letter that spying outside of FISA is "illegal," and since it's indisputable that the Bush administration did just that for years, doesn't that compel him as Attorney General to commence a criminal investigation into this "illegal" conduct?

An interesting point, and one our House and Senate leaders should be carefully considering before they move on with this legislation. The Attorney General of the United States--our nation's chief law enforcement officer--just admitted, in a letter to them, that the wiretapping the government has been conducting since 2001 is illegal. And they knew it. Does Congress really want to be rewarding such a brazen flouting of the law?