The defense argued that Mr. Gates was the only witness to testify that Mr. Manafort knowingly and willfully engaged in fraud to hide his income and deceive banks. In fact, they said, Mr. Manafort only misinterpreted or overlooked complex financial regulations, such as the requirement to report foreign bank accounts to federal authorities.

Mr. Andres acknowledged to the jury that Mr. Gates was a flawed witness. “We are not asking you to take Rick Gates’s testimony at face value,” he said. “We’re not asking you to like him either.” When Mr. Manafort enlisted Mr. Gates to help him execute a fraud scheme that spanned more than seven years, he said, “he didn’t choose a Boy Scout.”

But he also told the jury that it could convict Mr. Manafort on the basis of his own words, highlighting emails and documents that Mr. Manafort personally wrote or signed. “Ladies and gentlemen, the star witness in this case is the documents,” he said.

Even though the bank records, loan applications and emails were voluminous, he said, “Mr. Manafort’s scheme, when you break it down, was not that complicated.” Mr. Manafort deliberately deceived his bookkeeper and tax accountants, Mr. Andres argued, so he could evade taxes on $16.5 million in income and then tricked banks into loaning him millions when “he was going broke and he couldn’t pay his bills.”

With the stroke of a pen, Mr. Andres argued, Mr. Manafort achieved financial magic, making mortgages and other debts disappear, turning a rental apartment into a second residence, changing a loan into income and back again, and disguising a near-bankrupt political consultancy into one whose income was “on the upswing.”

He repeatedly asked the jurors, who are to begin their deliberations Thursday morning, to rely on their common sense when confronting book after exhibit book of financial documents. “Ladies and gentlemen, a loan is not income. Income is not a loan. You don’t need to be a tax expert to understand that,” he said.

He told them to ask themselves why Mr. Manafort would pay an accounting firm $100,000 a year to pay his bills, but pay more than $15 million in personal expenses himself out of 31 foreign bank accounts in Cyprus and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. “The answer? He wanted to hide those accounts,” he said. “Use your common sense.”