Robert Mueller’s longtime boss appears inclined to stick it out until the end after all.

Rod Rosenstein — the deputy attorney general who appointed the special counsel, signed off on all his major decisions and even spoke on behalf of the investigation at a news conference and in congressional testimony — is not ready to leave just yet, putting off his previously planned departure for at least a few weeks, a source familiar with his plans confirmed on Tuesday.

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It’s a decision that puts the Justice Department’s No. 2 official in a position to shepherd the politically charged probe to its long-awaited conclusion. Rosenstein has long provided comfort to lawmakers and legal observers worried about President Donald Trump trying to meddle with the inquiry, which is examining whether his 2016 campaign colluded with Russia. The deputy attorney general assumed oversight of the investigation after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself because of the prominent role he played in Trump’s presidential campaign.

“It’s hard to believe that Rosenstein would leave with Mueller hanging,” said John Dean, the White House counsel in President Richard Nixon’s administration.

Initially, Rosenstein had signaled plans to stay at the Justice Department for only four to six weeks following William Barr’s mid-February arrival as attorney general. But with that timeline rapidly approaching this week, Rosenstein had yet to set a departure date. His decision to stay put a little longer was taken as yet another sign among a growing body of clues that the special counsel is indeed nearing the finish line.

Of course, Mueller could still outlast Rosenstein, who is on the verge of ending a three-decade government career that started during the George H.W. Bush administration. The special counsel remains under no deadline to finish his work and still has several outstanding pieces of business, including a trial against longtime Trump associate Roger Stone that is slated to begin in November.

Still, Rosenstein’s fluid departure timeline gives him a good chance at seeing Mueller through to a conclusion that seems increasingly imminent. In the last week, a Mueller spokesman has confirmed plans of two senior prosecutors to depart the special counsel’s office, and the FBI has also said the lead senior agent working with Mueller left earlier this month to start another job supervising the bureau’s field office in Richmond, Va.

A senior Justice Department official familiar with Rosenstein’s initial plan said earlier this year that the deputy attorney general wasn’t linking his departure to the timing of Mueller’s report. The person insisted the deputy attorney general, who has withstood a barrage of criticism from Trump about the special counsel’s appointment, felt comfortable with Barr assuming the reins overseeing Mueller’s work and intended to step down once the attorney general had settled in.

During a February appearance at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Rosenstein himself signaled confidence in the new attorney general and predicted that Barr would “do the right thing” when it came to one of his most pressing decisions: the public release of Mueller’s findings. Mueller is required to submit a report to the attorney general outlining his investigation. The attorney general has said he will then create a summary of that report for Congress and the public.

In recent weeks, some of Rosenstein’s friends and former colleagues said they nonetheless envisioned him itching to stay around to put a bow on the Mueller investigation he launched.

“I can see him being the type of person that feels enough responsibility or ownership over this probe that he quite purposefully sticks around until it hits,” said James Trusty, a former Justice Department prosecutor and longtime Rosenstein friend.

But Trusty added that Rosenstein wouldn’t overstay his welcome, either.

“He’s also a big believer in orderly transition, and he doesn’t have the type of ego that thinks he’s irreplaceable,” he said.

Many ex-prosecutors say they suspect that Rosenstein might be staying on not just to bless a Mueller report, but also to sign off on some other critical decisions on cases that have swirled around the special counsel’s investigation.

Prosecutors are believed to still be considering false-statement charges against former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who was accused in an inspector general’s report of providing inaccurate information about his role in disclosures of information to the media. McCabe denied the allegations, but he was fired with Rosenstein’s concurrence one year ago.

And Greg Craig, the White House counsel under President Barack Obama, has come under scrutiny from prosecutors over his involvement in the illegal Ukrainian lobbying scheme organized by Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman.

Craig’s former law firm, Skadden Arps, avoided foreign lobbying charges by paying $4.6 million to the Justice Department and agreeing to implement safeguards against future violations. But the deal did not resolve the potential criminal liability of individuals, and Manhattan authorities recently handed the investigation back to federal prosecutors in Washington, according to a recent New York Times report.

Craig, who has not been publicly charged, has denied wrongdoing.

Justice Department officials haven’t said what specific matters are keeping Rosenstein on, but one aide said Tuesday that Barr — whose first stint as attorney general ended with the arrival of the Clinton administration in 1993 — has appreciated and relied on Rosenstein’s guidance on the current slate of issues and cases facing the department.

As Rosenstein prepares to leave the department, the longtime prosecutor has been on something of a farewell tour. Some of his recent public comments could offer suggestions on how the investigation he’s supervised will play out.

At the February CSIS event, Rosenstein defended the “structural independence” inside the underlying Justice Department special counsel regulations. Specifically, he pointed to a provision requiring the attorney general to submit a second report to Congress detailing any actions Mueller proposed that his supervisors overruled.

But the deputy attorney general also warned that the fierce desire for insight into Mueller’s inner workings could create a bad precedent, cautioning that it’s historically not been the Justice Department’s business to air people’s behavior if it doesn’t reach the level of an indictment.

“If we aren’t prepared to prove our case beyond a reasonable doubt in court, then we have no business making allegations against American citizens,” Rosenstein said. “I know there’s a tension there between the desire to be more transparent and let everybody know what we’re doing and the desire to ensure the government, through its work, is not unduly tainting anybody.”

Rosenstein made a similar argument in a memo he authored that Trump initially used to justify firing FBI Director James Comey. One passage in particular faults Comey for chiding former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her aides for being “extremely careless” in their handling of classified material on personal email servers, despite deciding not to charge anyone in the case.

Trump’s dismissal of Comey later became part of a Mueller investigation into whether the president obstructed justice, given Trump’s public admission that he wanted Comey gone to relieve the pressure of the Russia case, which had initially been in the FBI’s hands. Rosenstein’s role in the incident led some legal experts and Trump backers to argue that he should have recused himself from managing Mueller’s investigation.

Rosenstein’s other public speeches have offered similar windows into his thoughts about the Trump era, although he often also seems unwilling to acknowledge the president’s frequently expressed contempt for the American justice system. Even friendly audiences are sometimes dumbfounded by the Justice Department veteran’s insistence that Trump is a stalwart supporter of the legal system.

“The president’s words about the rule of law are backed by concrete action,” Rosenstein said in a November 2017 speech to judges and prominent lawyers at the D.C. federal courthouse where Mueller’s key grand jury meets and most of his criminal cases were filed.

Attendees from Washington’s legal establishment welcomed Rosenstein’s repeated assurances that the Justice Department was being managed independently of political considerations, but during a reception following the speech, several friends and former colleagues of Rosenstein’s expressed puzzlement at what they regarded as his implausible defense of Trump.

Rosenstein sometimes peppers his remarks with as many as half a dozen mentions of Trump and his agenda, making a conspicuous show of public alignment with the White House while defending the Justice Department’s autonomy in specific cases. The deputy attorney general also isn’t bashful about sharing views that seem likely to win favor in the Oval Office.

Just last week, he delivered a speech that unmistakably embraced some of Trump’s polarizing rhetoric on immigration.

“America is a great nation that does not need walls to keep its citizens from leaving, like the Soviet Union,” Rosenstein told new immigration judges. “We build walls only to protect ourselves and enforce our rules.”

Other observers have marveled at Rosenstein’s willingness to pay tribute to Trump even in the aftermath of the public attacks from the president. Last month, for example, Trump suggested that Rosenstein took part in an attempted coup that amounted to treason.

“Wow, so many lies by now disgraced acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “He was fired for lying, and now his story gets even more deranged. He and Rod J. Rosenstein, who was hired by Jeff Sessions (another beauty), look like they were planning a very illegal act, and got caught. This was the illegal and treasonous ‘insurance policy’ in full action!”

Just a week later, Rosenstein delivered his CSIS speech, where he again turned to an obscure Trump proclamation to assert the president’s devotion to the rule of law.

“As the president recognized, law provides the framework for freedom,” Rosenstein declared.

“I’m very confident that when we look back in the long run on this era in the Department of Justice, we will be proud of the way the department has conducted itself and the president will deserve credit for the folks that he appointed to run the department,” the deputy attorney general said.

Perhaps the only certainty is that few, if any, prior seconds-in-command at the Justice Department have had their words scrutinized as much as Rosenstein.

“I can’t imagine too many other deputy attorneys general where Ben Folds writes a song about them,” said Trusty, Rosenstein’s friend.

The White House has dropped plans to nominate a veteran lawyer to serve on a key federal energy panel after pressure from Energy Secretary Rick Perry and major coal companies headed by allies of President Donald Trump, two people familiar with the effort told POLITICO.

POLITICO reported last month that David Hill, who served as the Energy Department’s general counsel under President George W. Bush, was the likely candidate for a seat on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. A senior administration official said at the time that Hill was “almost certain” to be tapped.

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But Perry and other senior DOE officials opposed giving the post to Hill, who had publicly criticized the Trump administration’s push to offer financial help to coal power plants — and they were joined in the effort by Joe Craft’s Alliance Resource Partners and Bob Murray’s Murray Energy Corp., the sources said. Both coal companies are major GOP donors, and Trump has said he planned to nominate Craft’s wife, Kelly Knight Craft, to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

When reached by POLITICO on Tuesday, Hill acknowledged that the White House informed him last week that his nomination process had been terminated.

He had been expected to fill the vacancy created by the death of former FERC Chairman Kevin McIntyre in January. But the parallel efforts by Perry and the coal industry proved to be more persuasive with Trump than his chief economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, who was lobbying for Hill.

FERC, an independent agency headed by a five-person board, oversees much of the nation’s electric grid as well as regional power markets. It has become a significant player in the debate about the Trump administration’s efforts to secure coal’s place in the U.S. power supply despite withering competition from alternatives such as natural gas and wind.

A Republican, Hill worked as a DOE deputy general counsel for three years before becoming the agency’s top lawyer. And like several other Bush energy officials, Hill openly criticized a DOE proposal to FERC that was aimed at propping up money-losing coal and nuclear power plants, calling it “absolutely not the solution” to fix the electricity markets.

Hundreds of coal-fired power plants have closed in recent years. Both Craft and Murray have pressed the Trump administration to support the industry, which has seen its share of the nation’s electricity generation plunge from more than 50 percent a decade ago to less than 30 percent last year.

Both Murray Energy and Alliance Resources have big stakes in whether FERC creates market supports for coal, a move the agency has so far resisted amid its effort to determine the resilience of the nation’s power grid.

Craft has donated millions of dollars to a wide range of GOP campaigns for years.

Murray is also a staunch Trump supporter and significant GOP donor, and he met with Perry in 2017 to deliver a list of policy priorities that would benefit the coal industry. He blasted FERC last year after the commissioners unanimously rejected Perry’s plan.

In 2017, Murray pressed White House officials help the coal industry, laying out in letters how Trump has instructed Perry to invoke emergency powers under the Federal Power Act to keep power plants operating.

A senior administration official this week told POLITICO that “influential detractors” leapt into action to derail Hill, but the person declined to pin the move on Craft and Murray.

Bob Murray said Tuesday that he was unaware of anything related to Hill’s nomination. “I have no knowledge regarding your inquiry. Thank you,” he said in a note to POLITICO.

DOE referred questions on Hill’s nomination to the White House. However, the White House declined to comment, and a spokesman for Alliance Resources did not respond to requests for comment.

A person familiar with the matter confirmed that senior DOE leadership has been consulted by the White House during the ongoing nomination process, and that they met with Hill and other candidates.

A White House annual economic report released Tuesday again floated the idea of creating a carve-out to help coal and nuclear power plants.

FERC’s vote to reject Perry’s plan early last year wasn’t the only failed effort to help the coal plants. The White House also shelved the more aggressive DOE plan — pushed by Murray — to invoke an emergency to force power companies to keep what it called “fuel-secure” generators like coal and nuclear plants open.

Rejecting Hill without having another candidate clear the FBI background check would suggest that a new nominee is probably at least three months away. However, a handful of other candidates have been under consideration at the White House: former Texas utility, oil and gas industry regulator Barry Smitherman; former Wisconsin utility commissioner Ellen Nowak; and Pat McCormick, a former aide to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska).

Andrew Restuccia contributed to this report.