Siljander, 60, a Michigan Republican who served in Congress from 1981 to 1987, was charged as part of a wider criminal case against members of the Islamic American Relief Agency, which prosecutors said had ties to the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, who was killed by U.S. forces in May.
He was sentenced today by U.S. District Judge Nanette Laughrey in Kansas City, Missouri. Four members of the now- defunct Columbia, Missouri-based IARA were also sentenced, U.S. Attorney Beth Phillips said in a statement.
After secretly sending more than $1 million to Iraq in violation of U.S. economic sanctions, “IARA then hired a former congressman to lobby the government on its behalf after it was listed as a specially designated global terrorist organization,” the prosecutor said.
The group’s executive director, Mubarak Hamed, and fundraiser Abdel Azim El-Siddiq in 2004 hired Siljander to lobby for the group’s removal from a U.S. Senate list of charities suspected of aiding international terrorism, Phillips said.
Prosecutors said Hamed conspired to hire Siljander to lobby for the charity's removal from a government list of charities suspected of funding international terrorism. The charity closed in October 2004 after being designated a global terrorist organization by the U.S. government.
Hamed, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Sudan, pleaded guilty in June 2010 to conspiring to transfer more than $1 million to Iraq and obstructing the administration of laws governing tax-exempt charities.
Siljander pleaded guilty the following month to obstruction and acting as an unregistered foreign agent. Prosecutors said he got $75,000 from the charity to push for its removal from the list, and that $50,000 of it was part of unused grant money that was supposed to have been returned to the U.S. Agency for International Development after it terminated its grants for two relief projects in Mali, Africa, with the charity in 1999.
Of the $2 million the charity received, $85,000 was supposed to have been returned to the agency and wasn't, according to Don Ledford, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office of the Western District of Missouri.
The indictment said Siljander and three charity officers agreed to cover up the money's origins and use it on the lobbying effort. Money was funneled to Siljander through nonprofits, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said Siljander, who now lives in Great Falls, Va., told investigators the money he received was a donation to help him write a book.
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