SAN FRANCISCO — Track coach Trevor Graham orchestrated a doping scheme for his elite track athletes and lied to federal investigators about his role in it, the prosecution said in closing arguments of Graham’s trial on Tuesday.

“This is a very simple, straight forward case. It’s about telling the truth,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeff Finigan told the jury. “If federal agents come to speak to you and you speak to them, there’s only one rule: You tell them the truth. ... Throughout the interview, he was not truthful with the agents.”

The defense officially rested its case outside the presence of the jury without calling a witness. Earlier Tuesday, the sides argued over the wording of the jury instructions and verdict form.

Graham is accused with three counts of lying to federal investigators in June 2004. Graham told two IRS agents that he never set up his athletes to receive drugs from Angel “Memo” Heredia, a Laredo, Texas, discus thrower who bought performance enhancing drugs in Mexico and sold them to many star track athletes.

“He denied it, he was unequivocal, he was definitive,” Finigan said.

Graham said he never met Heredia in person and had not talked to him on the phone since 1997.

But during Graham’s trial, prosecutors produced numerous witnesses, photographs and telephone records and FedEx receipts showing the track coach and Heredia shared a much deeper connection than Graham admitted. The jury reviewed evidence of more than 100 calls made from two of Graham’s telephones to Heredia’s house and photographs showing the two together in Texas.

The jury also heard tapes of a few calls between Graham and Heredia when the prosecution said the two talked about how to cover up their roles in the case.

In addition, Olympic gold medal winners Antonio Pettigrew, Jerome Young and Dennis Mitchell and two other athletes testified that Graham introduced them to Heredia and encouraged them to buy and use performance-enhancing drugs. It was Pettigrew’s first public admission of drug use and has placed the gold medal he won as part of the 1,600-meter relay team at the 2000 Sydney Olympics in jeopardy.

Finally, Heredia testified that he shipped a steady supply of drugs to Graham in Raleigh, N.C., and had the FedEx receipts to prove it.

“The lies he told in this interview were a calculated effort on the defendant’s part to lead investigators away from him,” Finigan said.

U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston found some of Heredia’s testimony “not believable,” and Graham’s attorney managed to poke holes in some of his claims. Even Finigan acknowledged that Heredia made “a lot of inconsistent statements” but Finigan said that Heredia’s testimony was corroborated by the testimony from the athletes and the documentary evidence submitted in the case.

Graham’s attorney William Keane admitted on the first day of trial that Graham “misspoke” when he denied meeting Heredia when, in fact, he spent several days at the drug dealer’s house over Christmas in 1996.

Graham played a key role in the investigation into BALCO when he sent federal doping officials in 2003 a vial of the then-undetectable steroid, “the clear.” Investigators traced the syringe back to BALCO, which was found to have distributed performance-enhancing drugs to numerous elite athletes in baseball, track and field, football and other sports.

The prosecution argued that it was not a selfless deed but meant to eliminate competition provided by BALCO.

“The syringe is really irrelevant,” Finigan said. “The issue is what is the defendant doing regarding doping athletes with respect to Mr. Heredia.”