Image by Youtube Sam Nunberg

Roger Stone, a longtime political adviser to President Trump, told former Trump aide Sam Nunberg in 2016 that he had met with Wikileaks leader Julian Assange in London, Nunberg told The Washington Post on Tuesday.

Another Stone associate also confirmed to the paper that Stone had made those claims.

Nunberg told the Post that investigators working for special counsel Robert Mueller asked him about that conversation with Stone. Investigators are looking into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russian operatives to swing the 2016 election. The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russians stole emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and gave them to Wikileaks, which released them during the campaign.

Stone told the Post that he had made the comments in jest in order to get off the phone with Nunberg.

In a series of increasingly-bizarre TV interviews last Monday, Nunberg maintained that he would not cooperate with Mueller, only to change his mind and appear before a grand jury on Friday.

Nunberg was fired from the Trump campaign in 2015 over a series of racist Facebook posts.

Contact Aiden Pink at pink@forward.com or on Twitter, @aidenpink