corruption defined

from the daily muck over at TPM:

In the latest court filing, federal prosecutors declared that Cunningham worked diligently to steer millions of federal dollars to [Mitchell Wade's] MZM and [Brent Wilkes'] ADCS. Justice Department documents say the two firms were his top priority for defense funding requests from the House Appropriations and Armed Services committees during 2003. Those firms, in turn, earned huge profits on those defense contracts, with profit margins exceeding 800 percent for some intelligence- related work, prosecutors charge. Part of that money was then returned to Cunningham in the form of bribes, a cycle that went on for more than five years.

When MZM and ADCS did not receive payments promptly from Defense Department officials, Cunningham personally intervened, calling or meeting with DOD officials to “browbeat” them into releasing the funds to MZM and ADCS and threatening to go to their superiors unless they moved quickly, according to the documents. In at least one case, Cunningham sought to have a DOD official fired because that official refused to respond to his demands.

Cunningham even “provided numerous blank sheets of his [C]ongressional letterhead to Wade” to enable Wade to draft letters on his behalf. Several of these blank sheets were seized during the search of MZM’s offices last year by federal agents, according to the latest government filing.