Influential US Senator Robert Menendez, a Democrat, has become the target of a federal investigation in New York, five years after he managed to avoid a corruption conviction, his adviser said on Wednesday, NBC News and Agerpres reported.

The investigative site Semafor, picked up by numerous US media outlets, claims that prosecutors from the New York State District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan are investigating Robert Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, without specifying the nature. accusations

“Senator Menendez knows that the press reported the investigation today (Wednesday), but he doesn’t know the reason for it,” said his political adviser, Michael Soliman. He stated that the senator became available to the investigation.

68-year-old Robert Menendez of Cuban descent, born in New York, is an influential politician. A Democratic representative of New Jersey in the House of Representatives between 1993 and 2006, then in the Senate, he chairs the powerful Foreign Affairs Committee in the upper house of the US Congress.

It was Menendez who last week called for a freeze on relations with Saudi Arabia and threatened to block arms sales to Riyadh after the OPEC+ group decided to sharply cut global oil production.

The decision, made on October 5 in Vienna by a group of oil producers, a personal defeat for Joe Biden, caused an unprecedented diplomatic conflict between Washington and Riyadh in recent decades.

The news of Menendez’s indictment came as a shock to Joe Biden as the Democratic Party hopes to retain its slim majority in Washington’s Congress in the midterm elections less than two weeks away on November 8.

Legal problems of the Democratic senator

The Democratic official has had problems with federal justice in the past. Rarely for a senator, he was indicted on corruption charges in 2015, but his trial, which nearly ended in 2017, was overturned due to lack of a unanimous jury verdict.

A year later, the Department of Justice – during the presidency of Donald Trump – asked a judge to drop all corruption charges against Robert Menendez.

He was accused of using his position to protect the interests of a wealthy Florida ophthalmologist, businessman and donor friend of Salomon Melgen in exchange for gifts and campaign funding.

The senator reportedly received free flights on private jets, borrowed a villa in the Dominican Republic, enjoyed three nights at a Paris palace, meals, golf games and more than $750,000 in campaign donations.

Instead, according to the version of the investigation at the time, Menendez would have helped Melgen get a contract with the customs authorities of the Dominican Republic, would have interfered with the fact that the doctor’s foreign girlfriends received American visas, and would have settled a dispute with the Ministry of Health.

The Washington Post recalled on Wednesday that Melgen, sentenced in 2017 to 17 years in prison for fraud, was pardoned and released on January 20, 2021, the last day of Trump’s presidency.