While Downing's discussions with the President's team violated no laws, they helped contribute to a deteriorating relationship between lawyers for Manafort and Mueller's prosecutors, who accused Manafort of holding out on them despite his pledge to assist them in any matter they deemed relevant, according to the people. That conflict spilled into public view on Monday when the prosecutors took the rare step of declaring that Manafort had breached his plea agreement by lying to them about a variety of subjects. Manafort's lawyers insisted that their client had been truthful but acknowledged that the two sides were at an impasse. Manafort will now face sentencing on two conspiracy charges and eight counts of financial fraud – crimes that could put him behind bars for at least 10 years. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Downing did not respond to a request for comment. Though it was unclear how frequently he spoke to Trump's lawyers or how much he revealed, his updates helped reassure Trump's legal team that Manafort had not implicated the President in any possible wrongdoing. Giuliani, who has taken an aggressive posture against the Russia investigation since Trump hired him in April, seized on Downing's information to unleash lines of attack onto the special counsel.

In asserting that investigators were unnecessarily targeting Trump, Giuliani accused the prosecutor overseeing the Manafort investigation, Andrew Weissmann, of keeping Manafort in solitary confinement simply in the hopes of forcing him to give false testimony about the President. Kevin Downing, a lawyer for Manafort, has been in contact with Trump’s lawyers. Credit:AP But detention officials decide whether inmates serve in solitary confinement, according to law enforcement officials, and allies of Manafort have said he is there for his own safety. A spokesman for Mueller's office declined to comment. Weissmann is a longtime senior Justice Department prosecutor who specialises in prosecuting financial crimes and turning defendants into cooperating witnesses. His aggressive nature has earned him two competing reputations: Prosecutors view him as a relentless investigator who has overseen some of the Justice Department's most complex investigations, but some defence lawyers say he is overly combative and will bend the facts to gain a conviction. In his own recent Twitter attacks on the special counsel, Trump seemed to imply that he had inside information about the prosecutors' lines of inquiry and frustrations. "Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie," the President wrote on Tuesday.

Earlier this month, he tweeted: "The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess. They have found no collusion and have gone absolutely nuts. They are screaming and shouting at people, horribly threatening them to come up with the answers they want." Manafort's legal team had long kept Trump's lawyers abreast of developments in his case under a joint defence agreement. Trump's team has pursued such pacts as a way to monitor the special counsel's inquiry. Giuliani said last month that the President's lawyers had agreements with lawyers for 32 witnesses or subjects of Mueller's 18-month-old investigation. Defence lawyers involved in investigations with multiple witnesses often form such alliances so they can share information without running afoul of attorney-client privilege rules. But when one defendant decides to cooperate with the government in a plea deal, that defence lawyer typically pulls out rather than antagonise the prosecutors who can influence the client's sentence. For instance, a lawyer for the President's former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, withdrew last year from such an agreement with Trump's lawyers before pleading guilty to a felony offence and agreeing to help the special counsel. Manafort's lawyers, on the other hand, maintained their joint defence agreement with the President's legal team even after Manafort pleaded guilty to two conspiracy counts in September and began answering questions in at least a dozen sessions with the special counsel. Even if the pact was mostly informal at that point, law enforcement experts said it was still highly unusual for Manafort's lawyers to keep up such contacts once their client had pledged to help the prosecutors in hope of a lighter punishment for his crimes.

Manafort must have wanted to keep a line open to the President in hope of a pardon, said Barbara McQuade, a former US attorney who now teaches law at the University of Michigan. "I'm not able to think of another reason," she said. If Manafort wanted to stay on the prosecutors' good side, "it would make no sense for him to continue to share information with other subjects of the investigation," said Chuck Rosenberg, a former US attorney and senior FBI official. He added: "He is either all in or all out with respect to cooperation. Typically, there is no middle ground." Loading In another development Tuesday, Manafort categorically denied a report in The Guardian claiming that he met with Julian Assange, the head of WikiLeaks, around the time he joined the Trump campaign in the spring of 2016. Mueller's team has investigated whether any associates of Trump conspired with Moscow's operation to influence the presidential election with documents stolen from Democratic computers and distributed by WikiLeaks. "This story is totally false and deliberately libellous. I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him. I have never been contacted by anyone connected to WikiLeaks, either directly or indirectly. I have never reached out to Assange or WikiLeaks on any matter," Manafort said in a statement released by his spokesman. He said he was considering legal action against the newspaper.