Trump Budget Funds Robert Mueller Through September 2019

President Donald Trump’s new budget proposal funds Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into his campaign — and his administration — through the 2019 fiscal year, despite the repeated assurances by White House lawyer Ty Cobb that the inquiry would end soon.

Politico notes:

The [Trump] 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.

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.

As Breitbart News has reported, Cobb has continued to shift the White House’s expected deadlines:

In August, he predicted that the probe would be over by Thanksgiving, or by the end of 2017 at the latest: “I’d be embarrassed if this is still haunting the White House by Thanksgiving and worse if it’s still haunting him by year end.”

Last month, Cobb predicted that the probe would be over by early January — “shortly after the first of the year absent some unforeseen delay.”

In mid-January, Cobb revised his estimate again, saying that he expected the part of the investigation pertaining to the White House to last another four to six weeks.

Mueller’s investigation is now thought to have moved past allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government — for which no real evidence appears to exist — and is said to focus on allegations of obstruction of justice.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.