The White House budget projects that special counsel Robert Mueller's team will keep spending at its current rate of about $10 million per year in the next fiscal year. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Trump budget anticipates Mueller investigation will stretch into fiscal year 2019

President Donald Trump's new budget projects that special counsel Robert Mueller's office will still be in business in fiscal year 2019 — even though White House officials have repeatedly said they expect the probe to wrap up soon.

The budget projects that Mueller's team will keep spending at its current rate of about $10 million per year in the next fiscal year, which starts in October.


Mueller's prosecutors have a criminal case pending against Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and deputy Rick Gates. No trial date has been set, but the judge suggested last month that a trial could start in August or September. If it does, the trial and any appeal would almost certainly extend into the next fiscal year.

The White House has said it expects Mueller to finish soon; spokesman Raj Shah told Fox News last month that officials "believe it will end soon." But White House attorney Ty Cobb said Monday that Trump's team is not looking for Mueller's office to shut down its operations entirely, merely to resolve the parts of its investigation that focus on Trump.

“We’re not looking for these guys to close up shop, but we are interested in trying to get the president’s piece of this resolved quickly," Cobb told POLITICO.

A spending report released by Mueller's office in December reported direct spending of $3.2 million from the time of his appointment in May until the end of fiscal year 2017 last September. Personnel assigned to Mueller's team also cost the Justice Department about $3.5 million during that period, but officials said those expenses would have been incurred whether or not the probe was handed to a special counsel.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein tapped Mueller, a former FBI director, to take over the investigation into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election after Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from all issues related to the election due to his prominent role in the Trump campaign.

Reached Monday, a spokesman for Mueller referred questions about the budget to officials at the Justice Department. A Justice Department spokesman called the $10 million figures for the current and next fiscal years “placeholder amounts consistent with amounts used in previous years when independent/special counsels were in existence.”

