When Paul Manafort’s attorneys rested his case at 11:53 A.M. on Tuesday without calling a single witness, courtroom tourists and avid onlookers of Robert Mueller’s Russia probe were flabbergasted, quick to characterize the development as the latest evidence that the former chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential bid was angling for a presidential pardon. But among veterans of white-collar trials I spoke with, the perceived plot twist was hardly a twist at all. When I asked for his thoughts, Sol Wisenberg, a deputy prosecutor in the Starr investigation, responded bluntly via e-mail, “Not surprised.” Renato Mariotti, a seasoned former Illinois prosecutor, was likewise unruffled. “If you were conducting a [poll] on the number of witnesses Manafort would call, I would have picked ‘zero,’” he told me.

Over the course of the Manafort trial’s first 10 days, more than two dozen witnesses were called to testify against the longtime Republican operative, who faces a slew of fraud and tax-evasion charges. The prosecution’s week and a half at bat was marked by the unexpected appearance last Monday of Manafort’s business associate and campaign deputy, Rick Gates, and high tensions between government attorneys and Judge T.S. Ellis III. So when Manafort, speaking for the first time during the trial, responded “No, sir,” when asked by Ellis whether he intended to take the stand, it was a muted denouement to his defense. It was also, according to Mariotti, likely his best defense. “It’s not uncommon for the defense to rest without calling witnesses in a case like this one,” he told me. “If the defense is facing overwhelming evidence and over 20 prosecution witnesses, calling one or two witnesses to make minor points can seem weaker than saying nothing at all.”

As former Washington, D.C., assistant U.S attorney John Marston explained, the strategy is rooted in the fact that the burden of proof rests with the government. “It never shifts, and if the government even hints at it shifting, that can be grounds for a mistrial,” he said. “When you are on the defense side of things, you really have to carefully decide what it is you want to do because you have every opportunity to argue that the government hasn’t proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and I think in just about every case that is a focus, obviously, of the defense: the insufficiency of the government’s proof. And you are free to argue that without putting on a single witness.”

During opening statements last week, Manafort’s defense team telegraphed that its objective was to undercut the prosecution by smearing its star witness: Gates. Thomas Zehnle, one of Manafort’s five defense attorneys, came out swinging at the man his client hired as an intern decades ago, seeking to cast Manafort as a disconnected, highly paid political operative who unwisely relied upon a staff of professionals, Gates chief among them, to handle his finances. As the prosecution made its case against Manafort, the defense zeroed in on Gates’s character, including the fact that he admitted to embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from his boss, as well as the authority he had over Manafort’s bank accounts. “Mr. Gates was the point man,” Zehnle said in his opening statement.

With Gates’s cross-examination complete, the only other viable option would have been to put a star witness on the stand—an option, Mariotti said, that the defense likely did not have. “In an ideal world, they would have an eyewitness who could testify that Gates was the mastermind of the whole thing,” he explained. “But the defense rarely has anything that good to work with.” Lacking that, as one Washington lawyer explained, “Their best bet was to just dissect the government case,” discrediting Gates and making a strong closing argument, which will be presented on Wednesday. “Defense orthodoxy is not to put on a defense—or the defendant—if you have successfully attacked the government’s case on cross-examination, which I’m sure they believe they did as best they could,” another D.C. defense attorney who specializes in government cases told me. “After seeing how the case unfolded, I think that’s their best shot.”

So while onlookers may have viewed the defense’s lack of witnesses as evidence of a slam dunk for the government, Marston dismissed this notion. “[Prosecutors] will begin to think about their own evidence, and about whether it is going to get over the high bar that they face,” he said. “Proof beyond a reasonable doubt when you have stood there with that burden on your shoulders—it’s an incredibly crushing weight.”