A former congressman from Michigan, Mark Siljander, has been sentenced in Kansas City for accepting stolen money to do work for a charity with alleged ties to terrorism.
Siljander represented central Michigan in the mid 1980s, but had since become a lobbyist. One of his clients was an organization based in the Sudan, with a branch in Missouri, called the Islamic American Relief Agency.
The federal government had named the agency a global terrorist organization in 2004. The agency apparently hired Siljander the same year, paying him 75-thousand dollars to get it off that list.
As he lobbied the State Department and others, Siljander never disclosed that he was working for a foreign agency. That’s illegal. Siljander was indicted January of 2008. US Attorney for Western Missouri Beth Phillips said came clean in 2010.
“ He admitted that he repeated lied to FBI agents and Prosecutors, and that he falsely denied that he was hired to advocate for the charity”, said Phillips.
Siljander’s been sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison. Several employees and officers of the Islamic American Relief Agency were also sentenced Wednesday. The Executive Director Mubarak Hamed, a naturalized US Citizen who was living in Columbia, got four years and ten months in prison without parole.
