Henry Cuellar’s Ties To Azerbaijan — What We Know Right Now
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When the FBI raided Rep. Henry Cuellar’s home and campaign office in Laredo, many on social media speculated why the raid was happening. An Intercept story on Cuellar’s dark-money Voter Education Fund, which has been running ads against his primary challenger Jessica Cisneros, went viral. An older intercept story from early 2020 on Cuellar’s extensive favors to border security lobbyists also resurfaced and started trending.
ABC News reported less than 24 hours later that a source familiar with the investigation said that the raid is “part of a wide-ranging federal probe relating to the former Soviet state of Azerbaijan and several U.S. businessmen.”
The FBI only confirmed the agency’s presence in Cuellar’s home and campaign office, but has not confirmed any details on the investigation.
The report by ABC was surprising. What does Henry Cuellar have to do with Azerbaijan and why is a congressman from Laredo the the co-chair of a Congressional Committee for that country?
Here’s a one-minute audio report I filed last night for Texas Public Radio summarizing the details that appear here after this clip:
First, a search for “Azerbaijan” on Cuellar’s congressional website on Thursday, January 20 turned up 47 news releases from his office. (As of 2:25PM on Friday, that number is down to 37.)
The main topic of some of the releases — aside from documenting numerous visits to Texas by the ambassador of Azerbaijan hosted by Cuellar — is higher education projects which Cuellar facilitated with the Assembly of Friends of Azerbaijan (AFAZ), “an educational and cultural organization which aims to build bridges between the United States and the Republic of Azerbaijan.”
Congressman Henry Cuellar, TAMIU provost and VP for academic affairs Dr. Pablo Arenaz
A search on Open Secrets, which tracks spending in politics, shows that Cuellar received campaign contributions from the AFAZ.
The name of the donor on the AFAZ campaign contribution record above is Kemal Oksuz.
Oksuz is a Houston business man who was charged for illegally funding a $750,000 congressional trip to Azerbaijan in 2013 that hosted Ruben Hinojosa, among other congressional representatives.
Cuellar was not on that trip, and a review by The House Ethics Committee said it found that “lawmakers obtained prior approval for the trip from the ethics panel ‘in good faith’ and found no wrongdoing.
However, Oksuz received a conviction for using a non-profit known as Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasions (TCAE) to funnel the funds for the trip from SOCAR — the Azerbaijan’s state-owned oil company, and another organization that Cuellar has tapped for some higher education projects.
On Thursday, another source familiar with the Cuellar investigation told CNN that The Department of Justice’s Public Integrity unit is involved, which handles cases involving campaign finance, among others.
None of this implicates Cuellar so far, and a preliminary search shows the Department of Justice has not brought new charges related to SOCAR or Oksuz since 2018 when it obtained a conviction for that case.
But we can see some of the relationships between congressman Cuellar and Azerbaijan that are currently publicly known.
Cuellar’s office did not respond to request for comment on Thursday but did say in a statement earlier this week that he will cooperate with the FBI’s investigation.
