Report: Cost of Mueller investigation exceeds $25 million

WASHINGTON — The Russia investigation has cost more than $25 million since special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment, according to a new Justice Department report released Friday.

The report is the third compiled by the Justice Department to detail Mueller’s expenditures as he investigates Russian election interference and any coordination with associates of President Donald Trump. Combined with the two previous reports, the latest expenditure provides insight into Mueller’s expenses from May 2017 through the end of September.

The total figure is lower than amounts Trump has cited in recent tweets. In November, the president claimed the investigation had cost $40 million. A few days later, he put the total at $30 million. In both tweets, he cited the cost as a waste.

In the new report covering April through September, the Justice Department says the Russia investigation cost a total of $8.5 million, down from the $10 million spent in the previous six-month period.

Mueller’s office directly accounted for $4.6 million in expenses, including $2.9 million for salaries and benefits and another $580,000 for travel. Another $3.9 million was spent by other government offices supporting the investigation.

Of the $25.2 million total, the Justice Department says about $13 million would have been spent on the Russia probe regardless of Mueller’s appointment.

The Justice Department has budgeted $10 million for Mueller to spend in fiscal 2019, which began Oct. 1.

To date, Mueller has convicted Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort on a variety of financial crimes and has indicted more than two dozen Russians, including intelligence operatives, for hacking into the computers of the Democratic National Committee and leaking information damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

Mueller also has secured guilty pleas or cooperation agreements from several of Trump’s associates, including his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and his former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen.

Trump has repeatedly attacked the Mueller investigation, calling it a witch hunt and alleging without providing proof that some of Mueller’s prosecutors are “angry” and politically biased. The president and some of his political allies have called for the investigation to end.

Mueller, however, appears to be on course to continue working into the new year.

Even if Mueller’s probe stretched through 2019, the timeline wouldn’t be unprecedented. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr spent four years investigating President Bill Clinton before releasing his report on the Monica Lewinsky affair, which spun out of a probe into an Arkansas land deal known as Whitewater.

It took almost two years for special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald to indict Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, for lying to investigators and obstruction of justice in October 2005 in the investigation into the public outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame.