Did Janet Mills Hire an Unregistered Foreign Agent to Run Maine’s New Migrant Office?

The Maine Wire’s Steve Robinson and Edward Tomic contributed to this story.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills and Rep. Deqa Dhalac (D-South Portland) created the controversial “Office of New Americans” (ONA) last year as part of the governor’s plan to bring 75,000 new workers to Maine over a five-year period.

On Dec. 18, Gov. Mills tapped former Catholic Charities and Department of Labor migrant resettlement coordinator Tarlan R. Ahmadov, 53, of Falmouth to be director of the ONA.

Since Ahmadov’s appointment, details of his checkered past, including anti-Armenian social media posts and political advocacy, have led some in Maine’s migrant community to call for for Ahmadov to resign or be replaced.

Among those calling for Ahmadov’s ouster is Anna Astvatsaturian Turcotte, an Armenian-American refugee who alleged in a Feb. 22 letter to Mills that Ahmadov not only has a track record of casting negative aspersions on Armenians, but he also served as a foreign agent as recently as last year.

In her letter, Turcotte flagged an anti-Armenian proclamation Ahmadov attempted to push through the Portland City Council — a resolution that was withdrawn once members of the Armenian community informed then-Mayor Kate Snyder that the resolution was “full of historical inaccuracies and lies.”

Turcotte then refers to an international trip that Ahmadov spearheaded last year involving several Maine elected officials.

“Most recently, in 2024, Ahmadov acted as an agent of the government of Azerbaijan, arranging for [a] Maine senator, representative, a judge and other authorities, to accept a lavish trip to Azerbaijan from this foreign government, where they were wined and dined in an area just recently emptied of its Armenian inhabitants, our churches destroyed, our cemeteries leveled, and where they blithely filmed propaganda for this authoritarian regime,” Turcotte said in her letter.

Notably, Turcotte alleged that Ahmadov was acting as a foreign agent for the government of Azerbaijan when he arranged the luxury junket. If that’s true, the U.S. law would have required Ahmadov to register as a foreign agent and provide details about his work for a foreign government.

Under the federal Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), anyone acting on behalf of a foreign regime — whether in Washington, DC or at the state and local level — must register as a foreign agent with the U.S. Department of Justice.

However, the national FARA database does not include any listings related to Ahmadov, prompting the question of whether he illegally acted as an agent of a foreign government while arranging the junket presumably on behalf of and clearly to the benefit of the Azeri government.

Gerard Kiladjian, president of the Armenian Cultural Association of Maine, made a similar claim about Ahmadov’s foreign agent status in his letter to Gov. Mills requesting Ahmadov’s resignation.

“Mr. Ahmadov personally facilitated and participated in a fully paid trip for several Maine legislators to Azerbaijan, where he acted as a government agent, arranging meetings with Azerbaijani officials,” Kiladjian said.

If Ahmadov was working on behalf of a foreign government and did not register with FARA, as appears to the be the case, he could have violated FARA.

FARA violations vary in severity according to the circumstance of the violation, but “Acting as an Unregistered Foreign Agent” without informing the U.S. Attorney General is a crime that could earn an individual up to ten years in prison under 18 U.S.C. § 951.

However, Attorney General Pam Bondi has recently issued a memorandum deprioritizing FARA violations from an enforcement perspective.

The Maine politicians who joined Ahmadov on the trip, in addition to Rep. Dhalac, were Sen. Jill Duson (D-Cumberland), Rep. Mana Abdi (D-Lewiston), and Cumberland County Probate Judge Paul Aronson.

Dhalac, Duson, and Abdi all listed the trip on their financial disclosures, with the payor described as “Fund to Support Azerbaijan Diaspora” or “Fund for Support Azerbaijan Diaspora.”

According to websites managed by the government of Azerbaijan, the Fund is directly managed by the State Committee on Work with Diaspora of the Republic of Azerbaijan, which is in turn under the direct oversight of the government of Azerbaijan.

In other words, the disclosures reveal that the government Azerbaijan paid for three Maine elected Democrats and a probate judge to have a luxury trip to Azerbaijan.

Ahmadov has not responded to an email requesting information about his relationship with the government of Azerbaijan. The various iterations of his public biography available on government websites, including a press release issued by the Mills Administration touting his appointment to head ONA, never mentions any work as a foreign agent.

The Mills Administration has not responded to an email asking about their vetting process prior to hiring Ahmadov to run the migrant resettlement office as well as the calls for him to resign.

Ahmadov is the founder and director of the Azerbaijan Society of Maine, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that is part of a network of Azeri diaspora groups, the Congress of Azerbaijani Societies of America (CASA).

In early 2024, Ahmadov was awarded a medal by the President of Azerbaijan and the Azeri State Committee on Work with Diaspora “For service in Diaspora activity.”

In 2020, Ahmadov was one of 19 representatives of U.S.-based Azeri diaspora organizations under CASA that signed onto a letter asking the U.S. Congress to reject a proposed House Resolution condemning Azerbaijan’s military operation in Nagorno-Karabakh.

That letter included a “fact sheet” regarding the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan from the Azeri Embassy to Washington, D.C. — disseminating information directly from the government of Azerbaijan.

Also a signatory on that letter was Irada Akhoundova, of the Azerbaijan Center and Houston-Baku Sister Cities Association in Houston, Texas.

Akhoundova pleaded guilty in May 2024 to one count of acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Azerbaijan, in connection with an investigation into Texas Democratic Congressman Rep. Henry Cuellar.

The Maine Wire has asked the Mills Administration, the Maine Ethics Commission, Ahmadov, and the politicians who attended the junket several questions about the trip, disclosure requirements, and Ahmadov’s past activism against Armenian interests.

According to Facebook posts by various participants on the trip, the delegation visited and toured the Nagorno-Karabakh region that was invaded by the Azerbaijan military, causing the mass displacement and exodus of the majority Armenian population.

In 2023, following a military offensive by the Azerbaijan military, an estimated 100,000 Armenians fled the region, leading Armenian and human rights organizations to describe the government’s actions as ethnic cleansing.