Stone denies using word 'negro' during interview with Black radio host

Roger Stone, whose 40-month prison sentence was commuted this month by President Trump, is denying using the word "negro" during a call-in interview Saturday with a Los-Angeles radio host.

The exchange occurred as show host Morris O'Kelly said that despite Stone's argument that he was treated unfairly and not afforded a fair trial, his longtime friendship with the president is what led to the commutation of his sentence, which is the equivalent of special judicial treatment.

It was at that point that Stone seemed to murmur, "I don't really feel like arguing with this negro."

O'Kelly asked Stone to repeat the comment, but Stone goes quiet instead. 

O'Kelly described "Negro" as the "low-calorie version of the N-Word."

Stone responded to the incident, saying “Mr. O’Kelly needs a good peroxide cleaning of the wax in his ears because at no time did I call him a negro. That said, Mr. O’Kelly needs to spend a little more time studying black history and institutions. The word negro is far from a slur.”

In past decades, "Negro" was a common part of American vernacular, used to describe African-Americans. However, since the late 1960s and rise of the Civil Rights movement, the word has been uniformly substituted with "Black."

The outdated term is now widely considered derogatory.

On his show's website, O'Kelly wrote, "Stone could have reached for any pejorative, but unfortunately went there." He "offered an unfiltered, unvarnished one-sentence expression of how he saw the journalist interviewing him."