I don't think Bush can retro-actively claim justification for the war based upon info he never bothered to mention before.
Why is this so hard to understand? Putin wants Bush re-elected because a weak US run by idiots with its economy destroyed is not much of a threat to him.
I can imagine plenty of reasons (yours is one, the fact that Bush's good/evil rhetoric makes it easier for Putin to rule with a brutal hand in Chechnya is another), but I just mean that we don't have any facts or sources on this yet.
Putin claims he passed this info on to the US just after 9/11. I find it hard to believe, given the administration's frantic grasping at evidentiary straws during the run-up, that we would be hearing about it for the first time now.