68-year-old lawyer William Barr will become the new US Attorney General. The cabinet contender, highly controversial for commenting on the investigation into the Russia affair, received the necessary approval of the Senate in Washington on Thursday. President Donald Trump's Republican Party passed Barr's appointment with a narrow majority in the Congress Chamber against the resistance of opposition Democrats.
54 senators voted for Barr, 45 against him. The opposition representatives voted almost completely negative. The new minister is regarded with suspicion by the Democrats, as he had expressed in a memo for the Ministry of Justice decidedly critical of parts of the work of Special Investigator Robert Mueller. Now he takes over the supervision of Mueller.
Mueller's team investigates whether there were any collusion between Moscow and Trump's electoral camp in the presumed Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. For Trump, the investigation is extremely unpleasant. He regularly scourges her as a "witch hunt".
Barr stood on Trump's side before the nomination
Bill Barr did not fully confirm at his Senate hearing that Mueller's final report on his investigations would be made public. Maybe he'll just disclose the results, Barr said. This would fuel speculation about a possible coverup of investigation results.
Barr had sided with Trump before his nomination and criticized the Mueller investigation. Therefore, the Democrats complained that Barr was not fit to supervise the investigation. Experience with the department has the 68-year-old already: He was already from 1991 to 1993 Minister of Justice under the then Republican President George Bush.
Barr succeeds Justice Secretary Jeff Sessions, whom Trump pushed out of office in November shortly after the midterm elections. Sessions had fallen out of favor with Trump a long time ago because he had kept out of the Russia investigation completely. The president had wished that the departmental chief would protect him from the investigations. Commissioner Trump had appointed a confidant, Matthew Whitaker, as head of the ministry.