CONCORD, N.H. (AP) – State Democrats want Congress to investigate whether politics delayed prosecution of a Republican phone-jamming plot in New Hampshire until after the 2004 presidential election.

The national furor over alleged politics in the firings of eight federal prosecutors prompted the move, state party Chairwoman Kathy Sullivan said.

The scheme devised by state and national Republicans jammed local Democratic ride-to-the-polls and a nonpartisan get-out-the-vote phone bank for about 90 minutes on Election Day 2002, the year of a hotly contested U.S. Senate race between then-Gov. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat, and then-U.S. Rep. John Sununu, a Republican, who won. The case resulted in four criminal convictions, including that of strategist James Tobin, of Bangor, Maine, who was New England chairman of President Bush’s re-election campaign two years later.

Allegations of Tobin’s involvement led him to resign that post the month before the election and he was indicted the month after it – timing that has prompted Democratic suspicions before. But members of Congress seeking answers to questions about the prosecutor firings should seek some about phone-jamming at the same time, Sullivan said.

“Why did it take so long for the indictment against Mr. Tobin to be brought?” she asked. “His name was apparently out there and known to the Department of Justice for several months and yet nothing was done with him until after the 2004 election.”

Sullivan said a request to the Senate Judiciary Committee, led by Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, should go out in a day or two.

Tobin was indicted in December 2004 on four counts of conspiracy to commit telephone harassment and aiding and abetting telephone harassment. He was convicted of telephone harassment and sentenced to 10 months in prison, but is appealing.

In addition to the criminal cases, Democrats sought damages in a civil lawsuit; state Republicans settled last year for $135,000.

In the civil case, Democrats had sought to make connections from the phone jamming to the White House and high-level Republicans like Ken Mehlman, then White House political director and later, chairman the Republican National Committee, through a pattern of phone calls made around the time of the jamming. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is at the heart of the prosecutor firings scandal, served as a White House counsel then.

Sullivan said speculation over a possible connection between the jamming and the current scandal began when news of the latter broke.

“This has been percolating,” she said. “When the U.S. attorney firings started coming out, I think people independently starting saying ‘Hey wait a minute, if they were firing people for political reasons,” there might be evidence of political influence in the jamming investigation too, Sullivan said.

That thought is not new. In 2004, Leahy and Sen. Edward Kennedy wrote to then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft asking him to stop interfering in the case. Manchester police contacted the Department of Justice about the incident in early 2003.

A Justice Department spokesman was not immediately available Tuesday to talk about the case.

Last week, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton pointed to the jamming case as evidence of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy.”

“To the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s credit, they sued and the trail led all the way to the Republican National Committee,” Clinton said.

“So if anybody tells you there is no vast, right-wing conspiracy, tell them that New Hampshire has proven it in court,” she said.

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