The sudden collapse of the cooperation agreement between Paul Manafort and Robert Mueller, followed by The Guardian’s explosive reporting on alleged clandestine meetings between Manafort and Julian Assange, has left legal experts scrambling to make sense of an already bewildering case. Back in September, Manafort had agreed to tell Mueller everything he knew in exchange for leniency on two conspiracy charges, heightening fears inside the West Wing that Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman might implicate the president in the Russia investigation. Instead, Manafort abruptly finds himself back to facing decades in jail—or seeking a pardon.

“It is absolutely devastating for Manafort at sentencing,” marveled Renato Mariotti, a former Illinois federal prosecutor. “The prosecutors are going to tell the judge that after he agreed to cooperate with the government, he lied to the government and lied to the special counsel.” If true, this is a federal crime—and one that suggests a total lack of remorse. “It is going to be very hard for Manafort to get up there and say that he has turned over a new leaf or that he is a new man or that his crimes are in the past,” Mariotti continued. “I would expect him to get just absolutely hammered.”

The question of Manafort’s long game now becomes much more complicated. It is not unheard of for a defendant to hold back information when cutting a deal with the government. “In my experience in fraud cases, you flip someone into a cooperator and in all honesty, they almost never fully, fully come clean,” said John Marston, a former Washington, D.C., assistant U.S. attorney. “There is usual someone they are trying to protect, even if they are falling on their own sword.”

Still, veterans of the F.B.I. and the D.C. bar are perplexed by the latest twist. “Pretty much when the F.B.I. is asking you questions, 90 percent of it is stuff that they already know; 10 percent is stuff that they are trying to find out,” said Asha Rangappa, a former F.B.I. counter-intelligence agent. That Manafort would risk lying to the special counsel, after having already been bested previously, is difficult to explain. (Manafort’s lawyers told a federal judge that their client “believes he has provided truthful information and does not agree with the government’s characterization or that he has breached the agreement.”)

It is possible, of course, that Manafort’s legal exposure—or the information he may be trying to protect—goes far beyond what has been previously made public. On Tuesday, The Guardian reported that Manafort secretly met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on three occasions—including one visit around March 2016, the same month Manafort joined the Trump campaign. It is unclear why Manafort would travel to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has taken refuge to avoid extradition, or what the two men might have discussed. Several months later, WikiLeaks, acting as an alleged cutout for Russian intelligence, released thousands of hacked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Guardian also reported that a separate internal document from Ecuador’s Senain intelligence agency lists “Paul Manaford” [sic] as a guest and mentions “Russians.” (WikiLeaks denied any such meeting. In a statement, Manafort said he had never met Assange, called the Guardian story “false and deliberately libelous,” and threatened to pursue legal action against the paper.)

The alleged Manafort-Assange back channel would represent the clearest known link between the Trump campaign and the Russian officers who targeted Clinton. The question is whether it’s a smoking gun. “You have these little dots that need to be connected,” Rangappa explained. “When you start putting the timeline into place, you can see a plausible picture of collusion forming in terms of Russia obtaining information that can be weaponized against Trump’s opponent, Russia wanting something, and then that being a quid pro quo.” (Later Tuesday, CNN reported Mueller is investigating a meeting between Manafort and Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno in 2017, and has specifically asked whether Assange was mentioned in the meeting.)