Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson was “fully aware” that the Islamic Society of North America was implicated in a major terrorist fundraising case and ID’d by prosecutors as a front for a global jihadist movement that seeks to turn America into an Islamic state through infiltration and subversion when he agreed to speak at ISNA’s annual convention on Saturday, a DHS spokesman told CounterJihad.com on Wednesday.

Johnson was the highest-ranking U.S. government official and the first sitting Cabinet officer to speak in person before ISNA’s conference held last week in Chicago.

As CJ first reported Sunday, ISNA had been considered off-limits to such high-level appearances since the U.S. Justice Department in 2008 designated the group as an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorist financing case in U.S. history and a front organization for the radical Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood.

Johnson’s spokesman Neema Hakim told CJ that, despite ISNA’s terrorist ties and radical background, Johnson agreed to appear at the event because he considered it an “opportunity” to conduct outreach with the American Muslim community.

“DHS and the secretary are fully aware of past evidence and allegations concerning ISNA and carefully considered them before accepting ISNA’s invitation,” Hakim said. “However, in the current environment, he viewed the opportunity to address literally thousands of American Muslims as crucial to our homeland security efforts.”

Asked why speaking from another venue or through a video would not have provided the same opportunity to address Muslims, Hakim declined comment. He also did not immediately respond to a letter sent to Johnson Wednesday from Rep. Steve King and two other Republican lawmakers demanding Johnson “renounce the Muslim Brotherhood and suspend further dealings by you or your subordinates with its front organizations like the Islamic Society of North America.”

In the two-page letter, the lawmakers said they were “appalled” that Johnson would “legitimize, let alone pander to, an organization or its proxy that poses a threat to our constitutional republic and its people.”

Reps. King, R-Iowa, Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, and Randy Weber, R-Texas, added: “The fact that you have explicitly called for your appearance before ISNA to serve as a precedent for other Cabinet officials to do the same amounts not just to willful blindness about the nature of the enemy. It is malfeasance.”

In his speech, Johnson encouraged other Cabinet officials to follow in his footsteps, saying, “I am proud to have broken that glass ceiling, and to have created the expectation, in the future, that government officials of my rank will attend your annual convention.”

The congressmen called the Muslim Brotherhood “a foreign terrorist organization” and warned that its front groups and operatives in America “are using a variety of techniques — both violent and stealthy — to accomplish the Brotherhood’s stated goal of Sharia’s triumph globally and the reestablishment of the Caliphate.”

A manifesto of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood recovered by the FBI during a 2004 raid of the Virginia home of a terrorist suspect, details a secret plan to “destroy” America “from within” and replace it with an Islamic state through a “grand jihad.” The so-called “Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America” lists ISNA first among 29 groups the Brotherhood claims as “our organizations.”