Roger Stone’s lawyer attempted to distance the flamboyant Republican operative’s outreach efforts to WikiLeaks from the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation into Russian interference in the opening statement of the case Wednesday.

Bruce Rogow also dismissed Stone’s pronouncements about his connections to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as exaggerations.

Stone is charged with misrepresenting his 2016 attempt at collaborating with WikiLeaks and founder Julian Assange to obtain dirt in the form of stolen emails on then-candidate Hillary Clinton when speaking with Trump-Russia investigators in Congress. The Justice Department alleges, among other things, that Stone intimidated a witness to stop him from telling the truth, lied about the specifics of his efforts to reach Assange, and purposely withheld relevant information from congressional investigators.

But speaking in front of a crowded Washington, D.C., courtroom, Rogow claimed that Stone’s “state of mind” was key and that Stone hadn’t purposely misled the committee because, in Stone’s thinking, the issue of WikiLeaks was distinct from that of Russian election meddling.

Stone, who in the summer of 2016 was an informal adviser with Trump’s campaign, tried to connect with Assange, who was suspected of having tens of thousands of stolen Democratic emails, and hacker Guccifer 2.0, a front for Russian intelligence. The cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, and later the U.S. intelligence community and special counsel Robert Mueller, determined the emails were stolen by Russian military intelligence.

“This was a Russian investigation, and the fact that it was a Russian investigation colored all his answers,” Stone’s attorney Bruce Rogow argued on Wednesday afternoon. “Its publicly stated scope was about what Russia was doing — not about what WikiLeaks was doing.”

Prosecutors argued in court earlier Wednesday that Stone “lied to the House Intelligence Committee because the truth looked bad — it looked bad to the Trump campaign, and it looked bad to Donald Trump.”

But Rogow, referring to a 2017 press release from the House Intelligence Committee, said that it laid out investigative parameters in 2017 that did not include mentions of WikiLeaks and Assange, and Stone responded accordingly.

The committee’s investigation into Russian election interference was focused on what Russian cyber activity and other active measures were directed against the United States and its allies if those measures included links between Russia and people associated with political campaigns or anyone else in the U.S.

But it was widely known for months prior to the House Intelligence Committee’s March press release — and thus before Stone’s allegedly misleading May 2017 letter to the committee and September 2017 congressional testimony — that the U.S. government believed WikiLeaks was inextricably linked to the issue of Russian interference.

A high-profile intelligence report on Russian interference released in early 2017 mentioned the role played by WikiLeaks a dozen times, including that Russian military intelligence relayed material it acquired from the Democratic National Committee and senior Democratic officials to WikiLeaks.

“Moscow most likely chose WikiLeaks because of its self-proclaimed reputation for authenticity,” the report stated.

Stone’s team argued over the summer that Russia wasn't behind the leak, and therefore all other allegations, including communications with Assange or WikiLeaks, "are irrelevant and immaterial to investigation about Russian interference with 2016 election.”

His legal team claimed the FBI relied solely on CrowdStrike, but DOJ argued in court that Mueller’s investigation uncovered evidence of its own pointing to Russia.

“Stone’s statement that the government has no other evidence is not only irrelevant to this proceeding but is also mistaken,” prosecutors told the court in June.

Mueller concluded that the Kremlin interfered in a “sweeping and systemic fashion."

Prosecutors say Stone tried to contact Assange by using conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi and radio host Randy Credico as conduits, allegedly misleading Congress in 2017 by concealing his WikiLeaks discussions with Corsi, telling the committee he’d only reached out to WikiLeaks through Credico.

But Stone’s lawyer dismissed these claims too, telling the court that Stone, Corsi, and Credico all exaggerated their WikiLeaks connections.

“He did brag about his ability to find out what was going on, but he had no intermediary — he found out everything in the public domain,” Rogow said of Stone.

Stone’s lawyer also said that “there was no intermediary between Roger Stone and Julian Assange — it’s made-up stuff“ and that “all these people were playing each other with their political machinations.”

After Rogow finished his opening statement, DOJ’s first witness, former FBI agent and Mueller team member Michelle Taylor, spent two hours outlining a detailed timeline of Stone’s likely communications about WikiLeaks with Credico, Corsi, Trump, and Trump campaign figures like Steve Bannon and Roger Stone.

Taylor will continue her testimony Thursday morning.