The Baku Lobbyist and Section 907
In Washington, D.C., Ezra Friedlander, a lobbyist for Azerbaijan's Foreign Ministry, spent the past year trying to make it easier for Baku to get foreign aid from the United States. He wanted Congress to vote for repealing Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act, passed almost 25 years ago during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, restricting U.S. assistance to Azerbaijan.
Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act is one of the principal formal mechanisms of the US Armenia-Azerbaijan policy architecture. Passed in 1992 during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War, the provision restricts direct US government assistance to the government of Azerbaijan, conditioning it on Azerbaijan taking demonstrable steps to cease its blockades and offensive uses of force against Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The provision is a rare instance of US law specifically restricting assistance to a country on the basis of its conduct toward Armenia.
While American presidents in both parties have waived the provision -- citing the need to counter terrorism and ensure security, particularly after 2001 -- the law has long been a target of the Baku government. The waiver mechanism allows the executive branch to suspend the restriction's application, but the provision's continued existence on the books represents a formal-legal acknowledgment of the Azerbaijani conduct toward Armenia that the original 1992 passage codified. Baku's objective of repealing the provision entirely would remove this formal-legal acknowledgment.
The $500K Lobbying Operation
Throughout 2025, Friedlander -- a former staffer for several New York politicians -- contacted members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. For his efforts, Azerbaijan pays him $500,000 a year to lobby the U.S. government and curry favor aligned with Baku's interests. The $500,000 annual fee is one component of the broader Azerbaijani lobbying-and-influence expenditure in Washington, which has been substantial across the post-2020 period.
The Azerbaijani lobbying operation in Washington is structurally well-resourced. Azerbaijan's hydrocarbon-revenue-funded state budget provides the resources for sustained high-expenditure lobbying engagement, and the Azerbaijani government has deployed those resources across multiple lobbying-and-influence channels: registered foreign-agent lobbyists (like Friedlander), think-tank-and-academic engagement, energy-sector-relationship leverage, and the broader strategic-partnership positioning with the US that the post-2025 Washington Declaration framework has formalised.
The cross-aisle engagement strategy -- contacting members of Congress on both sides of the political spectrum -- reflects the Azerbaijani lobbying operation's sophistication. By engaging both Republican and Democratic members, the operation builds the bipartisan-coalition support that legislative changes like the Section 907 repeal would require. The end-of-2025 introduction of repeal legislation by Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a hard-right conservative Republican from Florida, represents the legislative-output of this sustained engagement.
The Section 907 Repeal Effort
At the end of 2025, U.S. Representative Anna Paulina Luna introduced legislation to repeal Section 907. While the bill has not progressed to passage, its introduction represents the legislative materialisation of the Azerbaijani lobbying objective. The repeal effort's significance: if successful, it would remove the formal-legal restriction on US assistance to Azerbaijan and eliminate the formal-legal acknowledgment of the Azerbaijani conduct toward Armenia that the provision codifies.
For the Armenia-side influence contest, the Section 907 repeal effort is a defensive battle. The Armenian-American diaspora-and-advocacy organisations (the Armenian National Committee of America, the Armenian Assembly of America, and the broader advocacy infrastructure) have historically defended Section 907 as one of the principal formal-legal mechanisms supporting the Armenian-side position in the US policy architecture. The repeal effort requires the Armenian-side advocacy to mobilise the Congressional relationships and the public-discourse engagement to prevent the repeal.
The repeal effort lands in the post-2025 Washington Declaration context. The Washington Declaration framework, which brought the US into the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace-process architecture, creates a complex environment for the Section 907 question. The Azerbaijani argument for repeal is that the post-Washington-Declaration normalisation makes the provision obsolete; the Armenian counter-argument is that the provision remains necessary precisely because the Azerbaijani "forked-tongue policy" (OWL's May 25 investigation) demonstrates that the normalisation has not produced the substantive Azerbaijani commitment that would justify removing the formal-legal restriction.
The Influence Contest's Broader Dimensions
The Section 907 fight is one component of the broader Armenia-Azerbaijan influence contest in Washington. The contest spans: the lobbying-expenditure competition (where Azerbaijan's hydrocarbon-funded resources provide a structural advantage over the Armenian-side diaspora-funded advocacy); the Congressional-relationship competition (where the Armenian-American diaspora's concentrated presence in specific Congressional districts provides the Armenian-side with electoral-constituency leverage); the executive-branch-engagement competition (where both sides engage the State Department, the National Security Council, and the broader executive-branch policy architecture); and the public-discourse competition (the think-tank, academic, and media engagement that shapes the broader Washington policy environment).
For Armenia, the influence contest is structurally asymmetric. Azerbaijan's state-resourced lobbying operation can sustain higher expenditure than the Armenian-side diaspora-funded advocacy. The Armenian-side advantage is the concentrated diaspora electoral-constituency presence and the moral-and-historical-argument resonance (the Armenian Genocide recognition, the Nagorno-Karabakh displacement, the broader historical-justice framework). The contest's outcome on specific questions like Section 907 depends on the relative effectiveness of the two sides' engagement on each specific question.
For the post-cycle Armenian government, the Washington influence contest is one of the principal external-engagement domains. The post-2025 strategic-realignment toward Western partners, including the US, makes the Washington policy environment substantially more important for Armenia than the pre-2018 Russia-aligned framework treated it. The Section 907 fight, the broader Congressional engagement, and the executive-branch relationship are the operational components of the US-Armenia engagement that the post-cycle government will need to sustain.
What We Are Watching Next
Three indicators will define the Washington influence-contest trajectory. (1) Whether the Section 907 repeal legislation progresses toward passage or stalls in the Congressional process. (2) Whether the Armenian-side advocacy mobilises effectively to defend Section 907 and the broader formal-legal architecture. (3) Whether the post-Washington-Declaration normalisation context shifts the US policy environment toward or against the Azerbaijani repeal objective.
The EVN Report Washington-lobbying investigation is one of the substantive Armenian-analytical engagements with the external-influence dimension of the bilateral conflict. The combination of the Friedlander-lobbying documentation, the Section 907 analysis, and the influence-contest framework places this analysis at the center of the cycle's external-engagement analytical dimension. OWL covers this content as part of our broader documentary scope of the Armenia-Azerbaijan strategic-competition environment.
Sources: EVN Report article "How Armenia and Azerbaijan Are Lobbying for Influence in D.C.," May 2026, primary source for the Ezra Friedlander lobbying documentation, the $500,000 annual fee, the Section 907 repeal effort, the Anna Paulina Luna legislation, and the influence-contest framework. Public-record information on Section 907 of the Freedom Support Act (1992), the US Armenia-Azerbaijan assistance-restriction framework, and the presidential-waiver mechanism. OWL companion investigations on the May 25 "Aliyev's Forked-Tongue Policy" analysis, the May 22 UK FCDO sanctions investigation, the post-2025 Washington Declaration framework coverage. All factual claims sourced to the named EVN Report article and the public-record references; OWL editorial framings on the lobbying-operation analysis, the influence-contest-asymmetry analysis, the post-Washington-Declaration-context analysis, and the watch-list indicators are clearly identified as such.