Washington

Russia probe: Special counsel Robert Mueller’s agreement with Paul Manafort imploded this week, likely spelling a harsher sentence for Donald Trump’s onetime campaign chairman and heightening the sense of siege at the White House. Manafort had agreed to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation in September, after he was convicted on eight felony counts and faced a second trial on other charges. This week, however, Mueller accused him of breaking the agreement with repeated lies. The 69-year-old Manafort met with Mueller’s prosecutors at least a dozen times while awaiting sentencing in solitary confinement. Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani revealed this week that a lawyer for

Manafort briefed Trump’s legal team on the questioning, giving Trump’s team insight into the case Mueller is building.

Mueller “wants Manafort to incriminate Trump,” Giuliani said. Now Mueller has asked a judge to sentence Manafort immediately, while an escalating series of tweets from Trump accusing the special counsel of causing “ruined lives”suggests that he might pardon Manafort to spare him from prison.

Manafort, along with Trump adviser Roger Stone, is also at the center of an investigation into whether the Trump campaign was given advance notice of the release of stolen emails. NBCNews .com reported that two months after WikiLeaks released a batch of emails stolen from Democrats in 2016, conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi sent an email to Stone. The message said, “Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps,” referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who was given refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy. The Trump camp denies links to WikiLeaks, but The Guardian (U.K.) reported this week that Manafort met with Assange in 2013, 2015, and in 2016, months before WikiLeaks published thousands of emails hacked by Russia. Manafort denied any meetings took place.