The wife of former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy claimed Thursday the prosecutors who convicted the once-successful businessman of bribing ex-Gov. Don Siegelman were agents of the devil as he did little to back up claims he uncovered evidence that will reverse his conviction.

During a news conference Thursday in front of the federal courthouse in Montgomery alongside her husband, his attorney and two of their nine children, Leslie Scrushy said her faith helped her power through her husband’s trial.

“In order to get through this, I had to look through the spiritual aspect of all of it. On the day that he was arraigned here … he was charged with [federal] Statute 666. So that was very clear to me where this attack was coming from,” Leslie Scrushy said.

The connection to the devil did not end there, according to her.

“And then, when the prosecutors rested their case, they rested their case on June 6 of 2006. 6-6-6. From my perspective, it was a conspiracy that required Franklin, Feaga and Fuller all to accomplish,” Leslie Scrushy said, referring to then-Acting U.S. Attorney Louis Franklin, then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Feaga and then-U.S. District Court Judge Mark Fuller.

“If you look at their names, they all start with the letter ‘F,’ which is the sixth letter of the alphabet,” Leslie Scrushy said. “So that was part of how I made it through, was to continue to pray to God to thank him for all of the blessings that we seek.”

Richard Scrushy’s bribery conviction came after he beat unrelated charges involving HealthSouth.

Prosecutors said Richard Scrushy directed high-level employees to falsify the books for Birmingham’s HealthSouth when its earnings didn’t meet Wall Street expectations. About $2.7 billion was at issue, overstated in financial reports from 1996 through 2002.

Scrushy was again tried in federal court – this time for bribery involving ex-Gov. Don Siegelman. Scrushy was accused of bribing Siegelman with $500,000 in exchange for a seat on the Certificate of Need Review Board, the state agency with oversight over HealthSouth.

In 2006, a federal jury convicted Siegelman of bribery for appointing Scrushy to that board.

Richard Scrushy held the news conference to announce what he claimed was newly uncovered evidence that would exonerate him.

“We found concealed exculpatory evidence that revealed corruption within the Department of Justice that caused wrongful imprisonment of both me and the former Gov. Don Siegelman,” Scrushy said.

Prosecutors, he claimed, “knowingly withheld voluminous amounts of information related to exculpatory evidence that would have proven both my innocence and Gov. Siegelman’s innocence.”

Scrushy claimed former Siegelman aide-turned-prosecution witness Nick Bailey told him he had 24 interviews with FBI agents but prosecutors only provided him with nots on five of the interviews.

“His testimony warped and changed over time,” Scrushy said, referring to Bailey. “It’s exculpable.”

Scrushy did not provide a statement or affidavit to back up his claim.

He also did not say what Bailey said in those interviews that would have proved his innocence on the bribery charges.

Along with his request for Trump administration officials to look over his case, Scrushy unveiled a website with a “bombshell press release” and evidence “exposing weaponization, fraud & corruption within the U.S. Department of Justice.”

Two sets of documents were uploaded to the site but they are not new and did not back up Scrushy’s statements from the news conference.

The uploads included a whistleblower’s report from 2009 filed by Tamarah Grimes, who worked on the team prosecuting the corruption case.

She accused prosecutors of mismanagement, failure to report improper contact with jurors and initiating a criminal investigation against her in retaliation for filing an Equal Employment Opportunity complaint.

A DOJ investigation rejected the accusations. In a Sept. 29 letter to President Barack Obama, Associate Special Counsel William E. Reukauf said the findings appeared to be reasonable, and the office has closed the case.

Grimes called the DOJ report on her complaint one-sided and incomplete.

The second upload was a 2016 declaration from former Alabama Power CEO Elmer Harris that he recommended Scrushy for the CON board and that he believed Scrushy’s and Siegelman’s prosecutions were politically motivated.

Harris died in 2019.