US senator Bob Menendez said amid a federal investigation that he has always behaved appropriately in office and that he was “not going anywhere”.
Menendez is expected to face federal charges of corruption over accusations involving gifts from a wealthy donor and inappropriate lobbying, according to media reports earlier in the day.
A former chairman of the foreign relations committee, Menendez has been under scrutiny for two years but has denied any wrongdoing.
“I have always conducted myself appropriately and in accordance with the law,” Menendez said in a statement he read to reporters in Newark, New Jersey on Friday. “I am not going anywhere.” He did not take any questions.
The Department of Justice is now understood to be ready to file charges in the next few weeks, according to CNN, which first reported the charges on Friday.
The federal investigation has focused on whether Menendez sought political favors for an old friend and prominent donor, Salomon Melgen, a Florida-based ophthalmologist, law enforcement sources told the cable network.
The criminal charges have reportedly been sanctioned by US attorney general Eric Holder and involve allegations that Menendez used his Senate office to promote Melgen’s business interests in return for gifts.
Menendez’s spokeswoman Tricia Enright told Reuters on Friday that the senator’s actions have all been “appropriate and lawful” and that she wouldn’t address the allegations further because “the official investigation of this matter is ongoing”.
The case could pose a high-profile test of the Justice Department’s ability to prosecute sitting lawmakers, having already spawned a legal battle over whether key evidence the government has gathered is protected by the Constitution’s Speech and Debate clause.
The FBI and prosecutors from the Justice Department’s public integrity section have pursued a variety of accusations against the senator, who dismisses the investigation as a the product of a smear campaign against him by political opponents.
Melgen and his family have been generous donors to the senator and various congressional committees to which Menendez is linked.
Investigators have focused in part on plane trips Menendez took in 2010 to the Dominican Republic as a guest of Melgen. In 2013, after word of the federal investigation became public, Menendez paid back Melgen $58,000 for the 2010 plane trips calling his failure to disclose the flights according to the rules an “oversight”.
Menendez is a vocal critic of Barack Obama’s policies to improve ties with Cuba and participate in direct diplomatic negotiations with Iran over nuclear weapons.
But investigators are examining allegations that Menendez lobbied on behalf of Melgen’s business interests, including advocating to federal Medicare administrators on his friend’s behalf after the Florida eye doctor was accused of over-billing the government for healthcare provision.
Federal prosecutors have also been examining whether Menendez unlawfully intervened to protect a business interest of Melgen’s in the Dominican Republic, though the senator argued he was attempting to curb the drug trade by his actions, not help his donor.
Menendez is currently serving his second full term as a US senator.
Other lines of inquiry against Menendez had included allegations he solicited prostitutes in the Dominican Republic, and that he violated the law helping win permanent US residency for two Ecuadorian banking magnates, the Isaias brothers.
Prostitution allegations collapsed after the women believed to have been involved recanted their story, and the FBI didn’t find evidence of wrongdoing in the Isaias matter, according CNN’s report from people briefed on the probe. Menendez has denied the allegations.
