 -- Excerpted from "The Making of the President 2016: How Trump Orchestrated a Revolution" by Roger Stone, arranged with Skyhorse Publishing, copyright 2016.

Hillary Clinton ran a 1980s-style campaign based on identity politics and it never knew how to connect with most Americans. The Russians had no role in her horrible campaign. The Russians did not force Hillary to ignore swing states. The Russians did not force the DNC to rig the primary in favor of a candidate with absolutely no charisma. The Russians did not force John Podesta plus dozens of Democratic Party operatives to write truths in their emails about Clinton that they could never permit the American people to read. Add to that that Donald Trump, my friend of almost 40 years turned out to be a very effective candidate and campaign

The Clinton campaign’s use of social media was a total failure, a wasteland compared to the massive presence Trump commanded. The Russians had nothing to do with that either. Hillary’s cronies, who jumped up and down swearing that the election could never be hacked weeks earlier when they thought they were going to win, decided only after they lost that the election had been hacked by the Russians.

I, myself, am the intended victim of an outlandish Russian hacking conspiracy fantasy. The White House and its press servants accused me of informing Trump that the Russians hacked the DNC. No such conversation ever took place. The Obama operatives knew the content of Clinton’s emails all along, yet started a baseless accusation that I had colluded with Russian hackers. I had strictly an back-channel communication with Julian Assange.

I candidly admitted that Julian Assange and I shared a mutual friend who told me that Assange was in possession of “unspecific political dynamite” that would be devastating to the Clinton campaign and that Wikileaks " had it all " which I took to mean it included the e-mails erased by Huma Abedin from Hillary's illegal server. I would describe this mutual friend variously as a "back-channel", "Intermediary" and "mutual friend"- all accurate. Don't blame me if my sources are better than the MSM. Everything my friend predicted turned out to be true.

The claim that I knew the specific subject matter of the subsequent WikiLeaks disclosures or that I had special knowledge of the timing of these disclosures is false, although the media generally expected a major release by Assange on October 5. In fact, Assange had already said on the record that he had information that was potentially politically damaging for Hillary Clinton. Instead on the fifth he announced there would be disclosures in October for each of the following ten weeks.

The post-election attack on me by Podesta was simply recycled from before the election. Unable to hide the embarrassing content of his emails, Podesta desperately thrashed about, trying anything and everything he could do, including lying, to distract from the leak itself. Unable to find a connection between Trump, Assange and the Russians, he invented one, arguing not only that the Russians stole the election, but that the Russians stole the election with my help. Not a single shred of evidence was ever produced, but some leaders in the intelligence community said what they were told. CIA Director Brennan, for example, who owned the security company that broke into State Department files to sanitize Barack Obama’s passport records prior to the 2008 election,71 claimed he was sure that the Russians hacked our election.

Podesta desperately tried to use one of my own tweets as some sort of proof. I had pointed out that anyone, including the Russians, could have hacked Hillary’s insecure, homemade email server. That her homemade email server was vulnerable to foreign attack was a major point of attack on Clinton. The Left and the mainstream media Clintonistas laughed at it for many months before Podesta signaled to switch to the narrative that the Russians had hacked emails between Clinton and the DNC and that I was somehow involved. As I told the press before the election, I was happy to speak with the FBI but they never contacted me.

John Podesta’s claim that my tweets somehow proved both my advance knowledge of the WikiLeaks hacking of his email account and the subject matter of the ultimate disclosures, is an example of claiming 2+2=6. It’s essentially conjecture, speculation, projection but no proof.

My specific tweet, saying “it will soon be Podesta’s time in the barrel,” needs to be seen in context. I posted this at a time when Podesta and his allies were savaging Paul Manafort with a series of leaks and false claims regarding his business activities in Ukraine. I knew from my own research- and a memo I saw in August that Podesta had been involved in money laundering for the Clinton Foundation and the Russian Mob among others things. My tweet was a specific reference to these issues and a series of stories on Podesta's shady business activities including an article I posted online on StoneColdTruth.com on October 13.

The entire “Stone knew” theme that Podesta repeated on CNN before the election (once again with CNN affording me no opportunity to respond) and then, along with other Clintonistas, recycled after the election, was as false after the election as it was before.