Former Michigan Republican Rep. Mark Deli Siljander was sentenced to prison on Wednesday for his work with a Missouri-based charity purportedly tied to terrorist groups.
“I stand before you broken in so many ways,” he told the court prior to sentencing, reports the Kansas City Star. “I did something wrong. I mistreated the system I believed in, and I mistreated my family and friends.”
Siljander, who left office in 1987, was sentenced to 366 days in prison for acting as an unregistered foreign agent and obstruction of justice. He had admitted to receiving payments from the Islamic American Relief Agency in return for lobbying for their removal from a Senate Finance Committee list of organizations tied to foreign terrorist groups.
He also admitted that he lied to federal authorities when they originally asked about the payments, which he claimed were to help him write a book.
Elected in 1980, Siljander first made a name for himself as an outspoken social conservative. He lost a primary to Fred Upton, now the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee, in 1986.
Siljander described himself as a “poster boy for Jerry Falwell” who decided to devote himself to fixing “cultural misunderstandings” in a 2007 interview with Urban Tulsa Weekly. That effort led him to start studying the Quran to find common ground between Christians and Muslims.
“I found out that Jesus was mentioned in the Quran 110 times, either directly or indirectly, and there was not a single word about Jesus that was horrible, disgraceful or, in my opinion, inconsistent with what the Bible says about him,” he told the paper.
In letters filed with the judge who sentenced Siljander, both Ed Meese, an Attorney General under President Reagan, and Bill Richardson, who served as President Clinton’s U.N. Ambassador before becoming Governor of New Mexico, praised him as a well-meaning public servant.
“Whenever I needed a partner to support my work on human rights, I knew I could count on Mark to be there and to commit his talents and efforts to helping other people,” Richardson wrote.
Delivering his sentence, Judge Nanette Laughrey said that Siljander must be sent to prison to deter others from engaging in similar activities.
Also sentenced Thursday were four other men involved with the charity, including its director Mubarek Hamed. Siljander and Hamed were the only two sent to prison, while the others were sentenced to probation and community service. None of the men were accused of having knowingly worked to support terrorists.
“If we had a terrorist event we would have charged a more serious case,” said U.S. Attorney Anthony Peter Gonzalez.