Jury deliberations are expected to begin Thursday morning in Stone’s case. But before the 12 Washington, D.C., residents start their deliberations, they got a final pitch from assistant U.S. attorney Jonathan Kravis, who argued that Stone’s attempts to mislead the House Intelligence Committee caused the panel to produce a factually incorrect report.

“Stone not only tried, he succeeded in impeding the committee’s investigation,” Kravis said. “The committee report is not accurate.”

The prosecutor pointed to where the House panel declared in its March 2018 report that it “did not find any evidence contradicting Stone's claim” that everything he said when boasting about the damage to Hillary Clinton’s campaign came from publicly available information.

“No evidence? Really?” Kravis said. “How about that Aug. 2 email from Jerome Corsi?”

That’s a reference to a message Kravis shared with the jury that gets to the heart of the government’s case against Stone. The communication showed that Stone was in contact with the conservative author and conspiracy theorist who apparently had links to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange through a conservative activist in England, Ted Malloch.

“Word is friend in embassy plans 2 more dumps,” Corsi wrote to Stone. “One shortly after i’m back. 2nd in Oct. Impact planned to be very damaging.”

Stone’s six-day trial has been replete with evidence of similar texts and emails from the height of the 2016 presidential campaign. Some show communications between Stone and New York talk show host Randy Credico about the timing and content of forthcoming WikiLeaks releases. Others show Stone in frequent contact with Trump campaign aides looking for intelligence on what the radical online transparency group had in store.

“The committee never saw any of those documents because Mr. Stone lied to the committee and told the committee that those did not exist,” Kravis said.

A spokesman for Rep. Devin Nunes, the GOP chairman of the House Intelligence Committee when it probed Russian interference in the 2016 election, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the prosecutor’s comment.

Kravis’ point, made for the first time near the end of his closing arguments, was intended to head off legalistic points from Stone’s defense that he’s not guilty because any possible misstatements or withheld emails were not “material” to the House committee’s probe. Stone’s attorneys have argued that the committee’s stated focus was Russian interference, not WikiLeaks or Assange.

“The documents were not relevant because they were not about Russian interference,” Stone defense attorney Bruce Rogow said in his own closing arguments. The lawyer added that Stone’s WikiLeaks-related communications with figures like Trump campaign deputy Rick Gates and campaign CEO Steve Bannon “had nothing to do” with Russian influence on the presidential race.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded, however, that Russian operatives laundered stolen emails through WikiLeaks.

“There was no purpose for Mr. Stone to have to lie about anything to protect the campaign when the campaign was doing nothing wrong in being interested in this information,” Rogow said, who added the Trump team broke no laws when it expressed delight at the prospect of WikiLeaks document dumps at the detriment of Clinton.

Rogow in his closing argument also insisted the lying allegations don’t make sense given the GOP operative volunteered to testify. And he claimed there wasn’t even a reason for Stone to lie since his efforts to glean insight into WikiLeaks’ plans was not illegal.

“So much of this case deals with that question that you need to ask, ‘So what?’” Rogow said.

Rogow also minimized Stone’s threats to Credico that prosecutors said constituted witness intimidation. The defense team said Stone’s allusions to a Godfather film and statements such as “prepare to die” are typical of a long history of outlandish banter between the two men.

“These two guys tampered with one another for 20 years over all kinds of crazy things,” Rogow said. “It was crude. It was odious. They used language that is terrible language, but that’s the way those two guys operated.”

Anticipating the Stone team’s attacks on Credico, Kravis maintained that Credico was not the kind of person to “pull the wool” over Stone's eyes. He reminded jurors that the witness himself testified to his own decades-long alcohol addictions and his career as a part-time comedian.

“He can be a little hard to take seriously. When he was on the stand he talked about Dick Tracy and characters in movies I’ve never even heard about,” Kravis said. “You could see why Roger Stone picked him to be the patsy in all this.”

Implicit in the prosecutor’s argument was that Stone’s misdirection also caused special counsel Robert Mueller to lose out on key evidence. Although Mueller indicted Stone as part of his broad criminal probe into 2016 election interference, Kravis argued that Stone’s dodging and weaving before congressional investigators meant some evidence of Stone’s activities are gone forever, including text messages he sent in 2017.

“Because Stone lied to them,” Kravis said, “the committee didn’t take that step and now those messages are gone.”

Michael Marando, a federal prosecutor who stepped in to make the government’s final points, became so animated as he railed against Stone's defense that fellow prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky poured extra water for his colleague and pushed it his way.

The government attorney then attacked Rogow’s “So what?” remark.

“So what? So what?” the prosecutor said, incredulously. “If that’s the state of affairs that we’re in, I’m pretty shocked. Truth matters. Truth still matters. OK?”

He barreled ahead.

“Mr. Stone came in and he lied to Congress, he obstructed their investigation and he tampered with a witness,” he added. “And that matters and you don't look at that and say, 'So what?' And for those reasons we ask you to find him guilty of the charged offenses."