The arrangement was highly unusual and inflamed tensions with Mueller’s office when prosecutors discovered it after Manafort began cooperating two months ago, the people said. Some legal specialists speculated it was a bid by Manafort for a presidential pardon even as he worked with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in hopes of a lighter sentence.

WASHINGTON — A lawyer for Paul Manafort, the president’s onetime campaign chairman, repeatedly briefed President Trump’s lawyers on his client’s discussions with federal investigators after Manafort agreed to cooperate with the special counsel, according to one of Trump’s lawyers and two other people familiar with the conversations.


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Rudolph W. Giuliani, one of the president’s personal lawyers, acknowledged the arrangement on Tuesday and defended it as a source of valuable insights into the special counsel’s inquiry and where it was headed. Such information could help shape a legal defense strategy, and it also appeared to give Trump and his legal advisers ammunition in their public relations effort against the special counsel’s office. For example, Giuliani said, Manafort’s lawyer Kevin M. Downing told him that prosecutors hammered away at whether the president knew about the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting where Russians promised to deliver damaging information on Hillary Clinton to his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. The president has long denied knowing about the meeting in advance. “He wants Manafort to incriminate Trump,” Giuliani declared of Mueller.

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 declared that Manafort had breached his plea deal by lying to them about several subjects.


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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.

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.

On Tuesday morning, Trump unleashed another blistering attack on Mueller, calling him a ‘‘conflicted prosecutor gone rogue’’ who is doing ‘‘TREMENDOUS damage’’ to the criminal justice system. ‘‘Wait until it comes out how horribly & viciously they are treating people, ruining lives for them refusing to lie,’’ Trump said. ‘‘Mueller is a conflicted prosecutor gone rogue. . . . The Fake News Media builds Bob Mueller up as a Saint, when in actuality he is the exact opposite. He is doing TREMENDOUS damage to our Criminal Justice System,” Trump tweeted.

Material from the Washington Post was used in this report.