Alaska Rep. Don Young, the state's sole representative in the U.S. House for 30 years, is being investigated for possible ethics violations, the House Ethics Committee said Tuesday.

According to a brief release from the Committee on Ethics, an investigative subcommittee was formed on Feb. 26 to determine if Young had violated any rules or regulations "with respect to allegations that he, or persons acting on his behalf, improperly obtained, received, or accepted gifts, improperly used official resources or campaign funds for personal purposes, failed to report certain gifts on his annual Financial Disclosure Statements, and made false statements to federal officials."

Young has been under investigation before, first by the FBI and the Department of Justice in the wake of a controversial $10 million earmark in 2005 for a Florida road project. That investigation was dropped in 2010, but then in 2011 the Ethics Committee began looking into potential wrongdoing with Young's legal fund. Young was cleared of wrongdoing in that investigation.

The new investigation appears to tie back to another of those past investigations. According to the statement released Tuesday:

"During the course of the Committee's investigation, a portion of which was initially requested by Representative Young, the Committee received a referral from the Department of Justice regarding Representative Young's expenses and travel costs for certain trips which were the subject of the Committee's ongoing review."

Young also briefly came under fire in April of last year after the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) released documents following a public-records request related to that Department of Justice investigation stemming from 2005. In those documents, an unnammed former Young staffer alleged that the representative and his wife, Lu -- who passed away in 2009 -- may have misused campaign funds for trips and meals.

""There was no doubt [redacted] that the expenses Lu Young was submitting were inappropriate, and it was a common topic of discussion in the office," the former staffer said in a 2008 interview included in the records released to CREW.

The organization also asserted that Young was still the subject of investigation, an allegation that Young's office denied. Young's then-spokesman Luke Miller said that Young was not the subject of any investigation as of April 2012, saying that "(i)t's time to move on." Young's lawyer also sent a letter to CREW demanding that the group retract the statement.

The Ethics Committee pointed out that the formation of the subcommittee does not indicate any violations had actually occurred. Michael Anderson, a spokesman for Rep. Young, said Tuesday that "Congressman Young has cooperated with the committee and will continue to do so." He declined to answer further questions on the matter.