As a legal strategy, it caught many by surprise, even if Stone’s defenders have done their part in court since the trial started to poke as many holes as they can in the government’s case.

As a political play, though, it might be perfectly tailored for a very different audience — MAGA-ites and the president himself. After all, a conviction on any of the seven counts opens Stone up to prison time and raises the question of whether Trump would face pressure to issue an election-year pardon to his longtime friend, who has a passionate following in Trump land.

“If you hesitate about your conclusions in this matter then you have a reasonable doubt,” Bruce Rogow, the lead Stone defense attorney, told the jury during his closing arguments Wednesday. “My job is to create for you the reasons why you should have a reasonable doubt.”

On Thursday, Stone’s six-day trial will shift to jury deliberations and a verdict soon thereafter, the final coda to months of legal wrangling that kicked off in January with a dramatic early-morning raid to arrest Stone at his South Florida home.

As the case moved toward a trial, Stone and his family have been appealing to a higher power.

They were at Sunday morning Mass about 10 days before his trial: “please pray for us,” his wife, Nydia Stone, wrote on Instagram alongside a prayer emoji, the hashtags #trump and #maga and a tag for the president’s Twitter handle.

And before opening arguments last Tuesday, Stone’s wife and daughter sat with a leather-bound Bible in their laps open to the Book of Psalms.

They were joined in the front row by Randy Short, a Washington, D.C., activist wearing a white religious smock who has described himself as Stone’s spiritual adviser.

In fact, Short participated in a small rally outside the courthouse on the first day of the trial, leading a chant that Stone was innocent and interspersing a pro-Trump song with the chorus: “I’m on the Trump train. We did it in ’16. Gonna do it again.”

In an interview, Short said Stone wasn’t concerned about the government’s parade of witnesses, which included Steve Bannon, the former Trump campaign CEO whom the government called to contradict Stone’s deposition to Congress that there had been no contact with Trump’s campaign about WikiLeaks.

“I don’t think Bannon is someone that would worry them,” Short said. “Their biggest fear from my sense is that there’s so many [jurors] who have intelligence community or government ties or ties to the former administration or lawyers. Where are the blue collar people on that? Really? I’m a Washingtonian. This city is still half black. If you look at the jury there are four blacks. There are two others and 10 white folks. It’s interesting not one black man is on there.”

“If you looked at the jury pool it looked like Green Bay, not like Washington, D.C. I mean, really,” Short added.