Washington (CNN)Donald Trump has rarely caught a break since special counsel Robert Mueller clamped a vise around his White House two years ago.

Yet the shorter than expected sentence handed to his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort is giving the President a few, rare crumbs of comfort as he faces down an expansive set of criminal, civil and congressional investigations into his presidency, campaign, business empire and personal life.

The Virginia judge who handed Manafort a 47-month sentence -- far below the federal guidelines for his crimes -- also gave Trump a propaganda tool for his fervent effort to discredit Mueller's investigation when he pointed out that the conviction was for bank and tax fraud and not for colluding with Russia.

"Both the Judge and the lawyer in the Paul Manafort case stated loudly and for the world to hear that there was NO COLLUSION with Russia. But the Witch Hunt Hoax continues," Trump tweeted on Friday, taking the remarks slightly out of context to make a point about the entire investigation.

Trump had already seized on new doubts about the credibility of his former lawyer Michael Cohen, who branded the President a con man and a liar in a sensational Capitol Hill hearing last week, but who is facing new accusations of perjury.

Nothing that happened Thursday lessened Trump's potential legal or political exposure, or repudiated Mueller's investigation, which has uncovered a pattern of lying by Trump acolytes about unexplained ties to Russia. It's a measure of how grim the last few years have been for the President that the jailing of his former campaign chairman could be interpreted in any way as good news for his White House.

And no one outside Mueller's circle has any idea what his final report -- expected to be delivered to Attorney General William Barr soon -- will say about the President's conduct.

But Thursday's events did raise some political and legal questions about the ambition of Mueller's prosecutors, their tactics when confronted by a skeptical judge and the credibility being placed in Cohen's deeply damaging testimony against Trump last week.