Longtime Republican operative Roger Stone told me the contents of his private conversations with Donald Trump in an interview taped this May after he participated in a national radio broadcast on the iHeart Radio network’s Miami news station 610 WIOD.

Stone has been friends with Donald Trump for 40-years but departed the campaign officially in August 2015.

In a wide-ranging interview, Stone also told me the inside story of his participation in the 2016 election, some of which he oddly omitted from his written testimony to Congress on September 25th, 2017.

Here is a key excerpt from the interview — which you can listen to below (transcript) — where Stone confirms that he personally recommended Paul Manafort to the Trump campaign and broadly describes his contact with Donald Trump in detail he wouldn’t reveal to other interviewers:

Grant Stern: What was your role in the campaign with the Paul Manafort selection? Were you involved in his selection?

Roger Stone: I have said publicly that I was among those who recommended Paul Manafort to Donald Trump. The campaign had entered a phase after which he lost the Wisconsin primary, the delegates from Louisiana are stolen from him despite the fact that he won the primary there, he lost the North Dakota delegates, he lost the Colorado delegates; you were heading to a situation in which it was certainly possible on paper for the Republican establishment to steal the nomination. This is an area of convention politics where Paul Manafort has a specific expertise. So, I cannot say that I solely recommended him but I was certainly among those who knew both Donald and knew Manafort and recommended him.

Grant Stern: Did you recommend him directly to Donald Trump?

Roger Stone: I did in one conversation.

Grant Stern: And what was your role through the rest of the campaign? Were you frequently in touch with Mr. Trump?

Roger Stone: I was a kibitzer. I had no formal role. I had no compensation from the Trump campaign. I was a self-appointed surrogate and I spoke to him on political matters from time to time giving him my own strategic observations. You could say recommendations, but Trump isn’t like your typical candidate, like I had worked for or with in other presidential campaigns. So, we had a certain comraderie, but I had no formal role.

Grant Stern: So, would you advise him and then he would do something based on what you were doing?

Roger Stone: I can give him my advice, he might take it, he might not take it. Then you just never know.

I shared the recording with former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti who said, “The main value of this is if he actually moved his lips and told Congress or the FBI something directly contradictory to it.”

While we don’t know everything that Stone told the House Intelligence Committee, he did release a written statement which contained this paragraph.

As a 40- year friend and advisor of Donald Trump, I had continually urged him to run for the presidency, beginning in 1988. When he decided in 2015 to become a serious candidate against a weak slate of opponents, I became one of the Trump campaign’s first consultants, reprising a role I played in 2012 when Donald Trump briefly considered a candidacy in that election. I performed consulting work for the campaign for five months and the consulting relationship ended in August 2015. I, however, didn’t go quietly into the night, I continued to work, write, and advocate on behalf of his candidacy because to this day…

Mariotti wrote a lengthy dissection of Stone’s ‘leaked’ testimony to the House, and described the second to last sentence above like this in JustSecurity.com:

This is one of the few firm assertions thus far that could be either proven or disproven with other evidence. That said, it is unclear what he means by ending the consulting relationship, since it is widely reported and he has claimed he regularly advises and consults the president.

What’s truly unusual about my chat with Roger Stone is that he readily revealed the details of his conversations with Donald Trump.

Stone was far more defensive in subsequent interviews — given on May 11th to CNN and May 12th to ABC — before Special Counsel Mueller was appointed on May 17th, 2017, telling CNN’s Chris Cuomo, “I’m not going to characterize what have been private conversations.” He told ABC that his access to the President could cease if he revealed their discussions.

The remainder of my interview with Roger Stone is about his Stop the Steal PAC, which he publicly claimed was an exit polling operation.

Stone refused to answer my persistent questioning about his experience as a pollster (none), about the results of his exit polling (won’t release them) or even how many people he deployed during the election.

Not even a range of people.

Stone’s involvement in Stop the Steal was the subject of numerous federal lawsuits alleging voter suppression, a topic which I covered extensively on Occupy Democrats during the election.