Most recently, Jerome Corsi, a conservative author and friend of the former Trump campaign aide Roger J. Stone Jr., said Mr. Mueller’s team is pressuring him to plead guilty to lying to them about his communications with Mr. Stone about WikiLeaks. Investigators are looking for links between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks, which distributed emails and other documents that Russian agents stole from Democratic computers before the 2016 election.
Mr. Corsi said on Monday that he refused the plea deal because he did not deliberately mislead investigators, but merely forgot about an email chain from two and a half years ago.
In his most recent criticism of the special counsel, Mr. Trump has suggested that prosecutors are frustrated because they cannot produce any evidence against his campaign. “The inner workings of the Mueller investigation are a total mess,” he wrote on Twitter recently.
“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,” he declared. “They are a disgrace to our Nation and don’t care how many lives” they ruin.
Mr. Trump’s lawyers responded last week to questions Mr. Mueller had for the president about ties between his campaign and Russia. Among the questions were inquiries about what Mr. Trump knew about Russian offers to Mr. Manafort during the campaign to assist Mr. Trump’s presidential run. The president’s lawyers have declined to discuss what he told Mr. Mueller, and it is not clear whether any of his answers conflicted with what Mr. Manafort told investigators.
Mr. Manafort’s allies have hoped that his sessions with the special counsel would end soon so he could be sentenced and transferred to a federal prison, where conditions are comparatively better than in a local jail. At a recent court hearing in Alexandria, Mr. Manafort came into the courtroom in a wheelchair, his foot wrapped in a white bandage, possibly from an attack of gout.
But few of Mr. Manafort’s friends predicted that his sentencing would be hastened by prosecutors declaring him to be a liar. The development stunned some people close to the White House, as well as legal experts.
“Everybody who lies to Mueller gets called on it — so he had to know that Mueller would catch him. So the question is: What was he hiding that is worse than going to jail for the rest of your life?” said Joyce Vance, a professor of law at the University of Alabama law school and former federal prosecutor. “There are often rocky dealings with a cooperator, and Mueller didn’t cut bait at the first sign of trouble. It was likely more than one lie and this would not have been a minor detail — it had to be something material and significant and intentional.”
