When Alabama’s sex-scandal-plagued Governor Robert Bentley stood before reporters Thursday to announce his appointment of state Attorney General Luther Strange to Jeff Sessions’s Senate seat, the most obvious question was: Is this a corrupt bargain to end the state’s criminal investigation of Bentley?

“I want to make this clear because I think there’s been some misconception here,” Strange replied. “We have never said in our office that we are investigating the governor.”

Yet an Alabama attorney, speaking on the condition of anonymity, tells The New Republic that he represents several witnesses in just such an investigation. He says that he and his clients met outside the grand jury room in Montgomery with Strange and the top lawyers in the state’s anti-corruption unit, and that they made it clear to him that Bentley was the target. Throughout the summer and early fall there was a flurry of activity around the case, the attorney says, but that it ground to a halt right after November 8, when Donald Trump’s surprise win cleared a path for Sessions’s ascent to the president’s cabinet and for Strange to claim his seat in the Senate.

The Bentley investigation is the worst-kept secret in Alabama. Days before the election, Strange wrote members of Alabama’s House Judiciary Committee asking them to suspend their impeachment investigation of Bentley until his office had completed “related work.” And in July, the Alabama Political Reporter staked out the grand jury room and snapped pictures of Bentley walking in along with Strange, his assistant state attorneys, and all the leading characters in Bentley’s scandalous soap opera, which revolves around an extramarital affair Bentley had with a top aide decades his junior.

With Strange now picking out office furniture in Washington, D.C., Bentley has the privilege of selecting a new attorney general, a development that has Alabama reporters and political junkies whipped up into a fury. Columnist Kyle Whitmire wrote that the move set “a new benchmark for Alabama corruption,” adding: “It’s so nakedly political that someone should charge them with indecent exposure.” Cartoonist J.D. Crowe drew a caricature of Strange and Bentley in the nude, with the governor reaching around to cup the new senator’s chest, a reference to an infamous clandestine recording of Bentley cooing about how much he loves to squeeze the breasts of his mistress Rebekah Mason.