When the prosecution of Scrushy collapsed in the winter and spring of 2005 and a Birmingham jury found Scrushy "not guilty," some in the legal community began questioning the wisdom of appointing less qualified Bush loyalists as federal prosecutors.

"I think they would have had a more effective case if they had kept Michael Rasmussen there," prominent Birmingham attorney Joe Whatley said during the Scrushy trial in Birmingham. "Rasmussen was a very effective prosecutor."

But it is also worth noting that political prosecutions by the U.S. Justice Department in Alabama did not even begin when Bush was elected in 2000. To learn the whole truth, you have to delve even further into the past.

Looking back on the record to the 1980s and the Department of Justice under President Ronald Reagan, Vice President Herbert Walker Bush and Attorney General Edwin Meese reveals another highly political time for justice in America.

A case could be made that the seed was planted for the prosecution of Richard Scrushy and former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman in the 1980s. At that time, U.S. Attorney Frank Donaldson, a Reagan appointee, had instigated an investigation of Birmingham's first black mayor, the popular educator Richard Arrington, who served five terms from 1979-1995.

In the months prior to the Birmingham mayoral election in October 1991, Arrington's second to last campaign, the Justice Department announced that it was investigating Arrington as "an unindicted co-conspirator" in a probe of alleged corruption at City Hall - on complaints filed by unnamed citizens, which later turned out to be one attempted entrapment set up after another.

The day after the announcement, HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, who was flying high with his new chain of out patient hospitals, spoke out against the Bush 41 Justice Department on Arrington's behalf. Scrushy's speech, which has been completely ignored by the national and local news media, came at a luncheon to honor Arrington as Birmingham's first black mayor.

The announcement of an investigation "cast a real veil on me then," Arrington said in an interview. "At that lunch, (Scrushy) got up and criticized the feds and expressed total confidence in me," he said. "That took a lot of guts."

When asked if he thought there were leftovers of the big battle between the U.S. Justice Department under Reagan and Bush 41 in the 1980s and his administration at Birmingham City Hall, he said it is not only possible, but likely.

"I think there are things that make it possible that there's still some taste in their mouths about that situation," Arrington said. "When Richard Scrushy stood up at that luncheon, a fund raiser for me, with the corporate people there, and expressed his total confidence in me and criticized the U.S. attorneys office, a week following that he had feds down there in his office questioning his staff and some of his physicians."

After an eight year-long investigation of Arrington and on the eve of Donaldson's retirement - after William Jefferson Clinton was elected president in November, 1992 – Donaldson announced publicly that the Arrington investigation was over and no charges would be filed.

But that is still not the whole story. To get to the bottom of it, you have to go back a little further to an investigation prior to the first Republican governor's election in Alabama since Reconstruction.

In 1985, the Reagan Justice Department had a chance to investigate a federal employee named Guy Hunt, who was forced to resign as a Reagan appointee from the Agriculture Stabilization and Conservation Service for using his office and staff for political purposes to run for governor.

A Reagan appointed U.S. attorney in Montgomery failed to bring charges against Hunt in that case, a case which is documented at length in a book about the Department of Justice by former New York Times reporter David Burnham. The book, which was published by Scribner in 1995, is called Above the Law: Secret Deals, Political Fixes and Other Misadventures of the U.S. Department of Justice. (The author of this story is cited in the text, the acknowledgements and the index for the chapter on his investigation of Guy Hunt).

The main thesis in the book, nailed best in that chapter, is that massive evidence showed the Reagan Justice Department spent more time and money investigating apparently innocent black Democrats and allowing guilty Republicans to go free.

In one of the biggest fluke elections at least in Alabama history, Hunt went on to win the governor's race in 1986 after a major legal and political brawl tainted the state Democratic Party.

Hunt would later be convicted and removed from office in a state prosecution for pocketing $200,000 from an account set up to pay for his inauguration. Hunt was not sentenced to any jail time, however, and received probation in part on the recommendation of assistant Attorney General Steve Feaga. Hunt was later pardoned by the parole board under the administration of Republican Governor Fob James.

Ironically, Feaga is now an assistant U.S. attorney and one of the two lead prosecutors in the federal prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman. Feaga recommended a 30-year sentence for Seigelman, 25 years for Scrushy.

A Republican judge appointed by Bush in 2002 sentenced Siegelman to seven years and four months in federal prison. Chief U.S. District Judge Mark E. Fuller sentenced Scrushy to six years and 10 months, and then ordered the U.S. Marshals Service to handcuff and shackle both defendants and take them to jail immediately, without so much as a hug and a goodbye to their families waiting in the courtroom.

According to legal experts, that is unprecedented in white-collar cases.

And now there are many who are starting to ask the obvious question: Was the Siegelman, Scrushy prosecution political form the outset?

Representative Artur Davis, a rising black star in the Democratic Party and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter July 6 asking Rep. John Conyers, chairman of the committee, to investigate.

A spokeswoman for Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said last week that the committee had no plans to investigate the Siegelman case since there was a jury in the case and since it is on appeal.

But the Senate Judiciary Committee has not ruled out an investigation, according to Tracy Schmaler, Leahy's inner circle communications director, who said the door is still open.

"We will look at all relevant information," she said.