Roger Stone, a former Trump campaign consultant whose prison sentence was commuted by the president, used a racial slur during an interview on “The Mo’Kelly Show.”
While speaking with host Mo’Kelly, whose real name is Morris W. O’Kelly, Stone seemed to get frustrated by a question about his relationship with Trump and commuted sentence and said the word “Negro” on air.
“There are thousands of people treated unfairly daily, how your number just happened to come up in the lottery, I am guessing it was more than just luck, Roger, right?” O’Kelly asked.
Over the phone, Stone could then be heard saying something about “arguing with this Negro,” though he seemed to be speaking to himself or something else in the room with him.
O’Kelly, who is Black, asked Stone to repeat himself. “I’m sorry you’re arguing with whom? I thought we were just having a spirited conversation. What happened? You said something about ‘Negro,’” O’Kelly said.
After staying silent for nearly a minute, Stone denied saying the slur, “I did not, you’re out of your mind.”
O’Kelly finished the interview with Stone and later told his listeners that “the only thing that I felt was true, honest and sincere that Roger Stone said was in that moment that he thought I was not listening.”
Stone was convicted on seven counts of witness tampering, making false statements and obstructing an official proceeding after special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign. In February, he was sentenced to 40 months in prison, but President Trump commuted the sentence on July 10.
After the incident on his show, O’Kelly told The New York Times he was “disappointed and dismayed that in 2020, that’s where we are.”
“It’s the diet version of the N-word, but as an African American man, it’s something I deal with pretty frequently,” he told the Times. “If there’s a takeaway from the conversation, it is that Roger Stone gave an unvarnished look into what is in the heart of many Americans today”