Ilham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, interviewed by David Frost for Al Jazeera in 2012. Image still via YouTube / Al Jazeera. Some rights reserved.
In late February, the Huffington Post ran a column praising the appointment of Mehriban Aliyeva, the Azerbaijani president’s wife, to the newly-created position of First Vice President. Where other US-based outlets, from the Washington Post to EurasiaNet, pointed out the farce of the appointment, the Huffington Post write-up compared Aliyeva to former American First Ladies like Eleanor Roosevelt and Nancy Reagan. “I would be proud to call First Lady Mehriban Aliyeva my Vice-President,” the op-ed closed.
The author, Mallory Moss Katz, carried no distinct ties to Azerbaijan in her listed biography. Rather, Huffington Post described Katz as a “commentator on women’s issues and psychiatry,” with a “passion” for, among other things, “the Chicago Cubs.” However, for those familiar with prior hagiographies on Azerbaijan’s ruling Aliyev family, Katz’s track record is well-known — and takes only a few moments of Googling to discern. Katz, at last check, was married to Jason Katz, the founder of a public relations firm named Tool Shed Group, LLC. And according to Department of Justice records, Tool Shed currently represents a single foreign client in the US: the Republic of Azerbaijan—a relationship that was not disclosed in Katz’s Huffington Post biography.
