The woman across the table demanded to know my cholesterol count. This was in front of 30 others, during an on-the-record discussion at Columbia University, where the woman—an academic named Brenda Shaffer, a Georgetown professor on sabbatical from the University of Haifa—replied to my question about her non-disclosures with questions of her own.

“If I asked you, Casey, OK, what’s your wife’s name, what school do you go to, who funds your scholarship right now, where do you work, how do you pay your meals, how do—what’s your cholesterol count—there’s nothing to be ashamed of in any of those answers,” Shaffer said.

My cholesterol. My wife’s name. Who paid my tuition, thus allowing me to sit in on the panel discussing Azerbaijan’s plans for a Southern Gas Corridor to reroute Caspian gas toward European markets. The panel featured Shaffer and Vitaliy Baylarbayov, the deputy vice president from SOCAR, Azerbaijan’s state-run hydrocarbon company. Shaffer established her assertiveness early. Halfway through the discussion, when the moderator, Jesse McCormick of the Center on Global Energy Policy, referred to Shaffer as a “panelist," she stopped him. “Moderator,” she corrected. The discussion continued, through some confused looks.

Once the floor opened, I raised my hand, interested in the role Tony Blair was playing in lobbying for Azerbaijan's pipeline interests. I was also interested in Shaffer’s role that day—and why she decided not to disclose her relationship with the Azerbaijani government, time and again, on that panel and in print. A few weeks earlier, Shaffer penned an op-ed in The New York Times claiming that Azerbaijan was the West’s important security partner and that, bizarrely, Russia’s “next land grab” would take place in the South Caucasus—rather than, say, Moldova or northern Kazakhstan. (This claim presumably would prime the West to offer greater diplomatic support for Azerbaijan in Moscow.) While most analysts scratched their heads at Shaffer’s reasoning, others focused on why she wrote the article in the first place. As first reported by RFE/RL, her impetus may have come from her role as an adviser “for strategic affairs” for the president of SOCAR. According to The Harvard Crimson, Shaffer has continued in that position, presenting a distinct, laughable barrier to her claims of objectivity when assessing Eurasian fuel.

When the relationship came to light, the Times was forced to issue an editor's note saying Shaffer had breached a contractual obligation to “disclose conflicts of interest, actual or potential.” Shortly thereafter, The Washington Post followed suit, issuing a clarification on an op-ed in which Shaffer had stumped for Azerbaijan’s pipeline push. It's not clear whether members of Congress knew of Shaffer’s relationship when she testified at a commission hearing over the summer, a discussion in which, in her stated capacity as a scholar, she spoke glowingly of Baku’s role as an American partner.