Paul Manafort does not scare easily. He flew into the Angolan bush to sign brutal Maoist rebel leader Jonas Savimbi as a lobbying client. He has done business with a Lebanese-born arms dealer and a front group for Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. He represented a Kashmiri outfit that allegedly fronted for Pakistan’s shadowy spy agency. And who originally introduced Manafort to Donald Trump? None other than Roy Cohn.

So Manafort was unlikely to have been seriously rattled when F.B.I. agents picked the lock on his front door and rousted him and his wife out of bed. The spate of disclosures of details about special counsel Robert Mueller’s pursuit of Manafort, including the search of his house, could actually be marginally helpful to his cause. But the leaks also look to be in sync with an emerging White House political strategy that could drive a wedge between Trump and Manafort.

The New York Times broke the news that when F.B.I. agents, brandishing a Mueller-acquired search warrant, raided Manafort’s Virginia home, they photographed the expensive suits in his closet—and, more ominously, that Mueller’s team had warned Manafort of its intention to indict him. CNN followed with a report that Manafort had been the subject of wiretaps before and during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Parsing unnamed sources is a speculative enterprise. But putting together the various threads of evidence regarding the latest leaks about Manafort’s case yields a surprising possibility. Mueller and his investigators are notoriously leak-averse. And the stories contained colorful details, but no new evidence of any Manafort wrongdoing. Even a subsequent Washington Post scoop—that Manafort apparently offered Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire and a former client, “private briefings” while he was Trump’s campaign chairman—showed dubious but not necessarily criminal behavior. Then there’s the fact that Manafort’s spokesman issued a statement demanding that the content of any wiretaps be released.

The leaks could be coming from Capitol Hill. But some signs point to the Trump and Manafort side, in service of two tactical goals: undermining the motives and credibility of Mueller’s work and shifting blame to President Barack Obama, whose Justice Department apparently renewed the wiretapping of Manafort’s phones. “The White House has tried to turn this into a couple of talking points,” says Brian Fallon, who was chief spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and is now a CNN commentator. “That a wiretap was happening prior to the election they try to use as confirmation that an unfair political targeting was afoot. And to the extent that they are going to accuse Mueller of waging a witch hunt, this warning shot to Manafort—that he should expect an indictment—shows that Mueller’s mind is made up and he is going into this hell-bent on finding scalps.”

“Mr. Manafort has said from the very beginning that he did not collude with the Russian government to undermine the 2016 election, and he knows of no one who did,” Jason Maloni, his spokesman, says. “Earlier this week we invited the D.O.J. to release any tapes involving Mr. Manafort and non-Americans. That’s how confident we are there is nothing there. What is clear is the previous administration petitioned a judge to surveil a political opponent, someone who they knew was talking to [Trump]. That is chilling.”

Maybe that interpretation helps in the court of public opinion. It does little to alleviate Manafort’s legal problems, however. At least two judges have now agreed that enough probable cause of crimes existed to approve a surveillance warrant of Manafort’s phones and then a search of his property. In the wake of the Post story about Manafort offering Deripaska insider information, White House lawyer Ty Cobb told Bloomberg News, “it would be truly shocking” if it turns out to be true that Manafort “tried to monetize his relationship with the president. It certainly would never have been tolerated by the president and his team.” Besides being laughable—Trump and Manafort are soul mates when it comes to making a buck—the comments risk alienating Manafort and pushing him toward Mueller.