(New York) Influential Democratic Senator Robert Menendez is under investigation by federal justice in New York, five years after narrowly escaping a corruption conviction, the American press reported on Wednesday.
Posted at 7:48 p.m.
The investigation site Semafor, taken up by numerous media, indicates that prosecutors from the federal prosecutor’s office in southern New York State, in Manhattan, are investigating the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, without specifying. content.
“Senator Menendez knows that the press is reporting an investigation today, but he does not know the scope,” his political adviser Michael Soliman said in a statement sent to local media.
Neither he nor his spokesman in the Senate responded to AFP’s requests.
Mr. Menendez is at the disposal of possible investigators, assured his adviser.
Robert Menendez, 68, of Cuban origin born in New York, is a veteran politician in Washington. Elected Democrat for New Jersey to the House of Representatives between 1993 and 2006, then to the Senate, he chairs the powerful Foreign Affairs Committee there.
The elected official has already had trouble with federal justice.
Very rare for a senator, he was indicted for corruption in 2015, but his almost completed trial in 2017 was canceled for lack of a unanimous jury verdict.
The following year, the Justice Department – under Republican President Donald Trump – asked a judge to drop all corruption charges against Robert Menendez.
He was accused of having used his position to defend the interests of a wealthy friend, ophthalmologist, businessman and donor from Florida, Salomon Melgen, in exchange for gifts and campaign funding.
The senator would have benefited from free flights in private jets, the loan of a villa in the Dominican Republic, three nights in a Parisian palace, meals, rounds of golf… and more than 750,000 dollars in campaign donations.
In exchange, according to justice at the time, Mr. Menendez would have helped Mr. Melgen to obtain a contract with the customs of the Dominican Republic, would have intervened so that foreign girlfriends of the doctor have American visas or to settle a dispute with the Ministry of Health.
the washington post recalls Wednesday that Mr. Melgen, sentenced in 2017 to 17 years in prison for fraud, had been pardoned and released on January 20, 2021, the last day of the Trump presidency.