About this series

Until now, you couldn't find out easily which members of Congress had given earmarks to campaign donors.

Or how much companies favored with earmarks spent on lobbying lawmakers.

The Seattle Times spent months compiling data to shine a light on those financial connections.

Reporters were able to tie about half of the 2,700 earmarks in the 2007 defense spending bill to members of Congress.

First, we culled all earmarks from the bill. We counted only items Congress funded but for which the military did not seek a penny.

Then we collected every news release issued by members of Congress on earmarks they championed. We found releases from 227 of the 535 members of Congress.

We scrutinized each claim, identifying the full name of the entity getting an earmark. We tried — mostly unsuccessfully — to have the military identify companies we couldn't identify.

We then searched campaign finance records from the Federal Election Commission for donations from employees or political action committees from those companies. The search covered six years of donations, the election cycle of a senator. We included some nonprofits in our search, but we did not include military units, business consortiums or most schools and hospitals.

We ultimately found more than 45,000 matches that were individually checked to ensure accuracy.

The matches were limited to incumbents and don't reflect contributions to challengers or to presidential campaigns. But they do include contributions to some members who no longer serve in Congress.

Finally, we manually searched lobby disclosure forms and typed in data from those forms.

David Heath: dheath@seattletimes.com, 206-464-2136

Hal Bernton: hbernton@seattletimes.com, 503-292-1016