Stone sued by feds over $2M in back taxes
The Justice Department sued Donald Trump’s ally Roger Stone on Friday, accusing the conservative provocateur and his wife of failing to pay nearly $2 million in income tax.
The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It alleges the couple underpaid their income tax by more than $1.5 million from 2007 until 2011 and separately alleges Stone also owes more than $400,000 for not fully paying his tax bill in 2018.
The suit alleges that the couple used a commercial entity known as Drake Ventures to “shield their personal income from enforced collection” and to fund a “lavish lifestyle.”
“Despite notice and demand for payment, Roger and Nydia Stone have failed and refused to pay the entire amount of the liabilities,” the lawsuit says.
Stone, a longtime confidant of the former president’s, calls the lawsuit “politically motivated.”
Stone was charged by the Justice Department in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and convicted at trial of lying to Congress, tampering with a witness and obstructing the House investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to tip the 2016 election. Trump later commuted Stone’s sentence and pardoned him.
Stone boasted during the 2016 campaign that he was in contact with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange through a trusted intermediary and hinted at inside knowledge of WikiLeaks’ plans to release more than 19,000 emails hacked from the servers of the Democratic National Committee. But Stone denied any wrongdoing and consistently criticized the case against him as politically motivated.
“The Internal Revenue Service is well aware that my three-year battle for freedom against the corrupted Mueller investigation has left me destitute,” Stone told The Associated Press. “There are no assets to take.”
In the years since she says extraterrestrial beings took her from her suburban yard outside Rochester, New York, Virginia Stringfellow has kept her story mostly within a close-knit community of people who say they have also encountered UFOs.
But over the past year, that pool has grown: Each of her monthly locals-only UFO meetups average about five new people who believe they have seen a mysterious object in the sky — not includ- ing about 50 out-of-towners who have tried to join.
“I have to turn away people,” said Stringfellow, 75.
Sightings of unidentified objects in 2020 nearly doubled in New York from the previous year, to about 300, according to data compiled by the National UFO Reporting Center. They also rose by about 1,000 nationwide, to more than 7,200 sightings.
But according to ufologists (pronounced “yoof-ologists”), as those who study the phenomena call them- selves, the trend is not nec- essarily the result of an alien invasion. Rather, it was proba- bly caused in part by another invader: the coronavirus.
Pushed to stay home by lockdown restrictions, many found themselves with more time to look up. In New York, droves of urbanites fleeing the virus took up residence in places such as the Catskills and the Adirondacks, where skies are largely free from light pollution. About a quarter of the reports nationally came in March and April of last year, when lockdowns were at their most strict. Glimmers wobbling across the sky have gone viral on TikTok, racking up millions of views.
Longtime UFO enthusi- asts say the pandemic clearly has more people scanning the night skies. But there is another reason that the pub
lic might be newly receptive to the idea that the flicker on the horizon is worth reporting: The Pentagon revealed over the summer that it would soon convene a new task force to investigate so-called “unidentified aerial phenom- ena” observed from military aircraft. Last year, it declassi- fied three such videos.
In addition, the $2.3 trillion appropriations package signed late last year by President Donald Trump includes a provision that the secre- tary of defense and director of national intelligence collaborate on a UFO report and release it to the public.
“It’s encouraging to many of us in the field of ufology that the government is willing to confirm that they are aware of these circumstances, that they are conceding that people are reporting these events,” said NUFORC direc- tor Peter Davenport.
Previously, he said, the government appeared to have believed “that people like me are just crazy — and we’re not.”
Davenport and his peers are quick to point out that any uptick in sightings does not mean a spike in flying saucers. Unidentified flying objects are just that — airborne phenomena that have not yet been identified.
The vast majority of sightings called in to the reporting center are swiftly deter- mined to be things such as birds, bats, satellites, planes and drones, he said.
A number of sightings last year were quickly identified as satellites launched by SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space-explora- tion initiative that conducted test runs over northern Idaho last year. One viral TikTok video of an object hovering in New Jersey last year turned out to be a Goodyear blimp.
“A skilled UFO investiga- tor is one of the most skep- tical people around,” Davenport said.
Only a small fraction of reports scrutinized by NUFORC, which is based in Washington state, are truly not identifiable. That propor- tion has not changed even as more calls have poured in, according to Davenport.
Ufologists are frequently prickly when it comes to the subject of apparent increases in UFO sightings, warning that bumps occur with regularity over the years.
In New York, as city dwellers have tried to escape the virus by relocating to the countryside, they have driven up rural sightings, said Chris DePerno, assistant director of the New York state branch of the Mutual UFO Network, a nonprofit organization that uses civilian investigators to study reports of UFOs.
Absent urban light pollution, he said, the transplants are taking new notice of the night sky and whatever may be in it.
“They come up toward the Hudson Valley — it’s beauti- ful up there, you get clear skies and then all of a sudden you see this thing zipping through the sky, that stopped on a dime, goes straight up, takes off again, stops, comes back. We’re talking incredible speeds,” said DePerno, a retired police detective. “With the COVID thing, more peo- ple are looking up.”
The seeming uptick in reports has come as a relief to some who say they’ve seen mysterious floating craft but feared they were alone.
“Because of the Pentagon being outed, there is more news now, there is more reporting now,” said String- fellow, who goes by Cookie. “People aren’t so afraid to say, ‘Oh, jeez, I was in the woods now, or I was by the lake, and this thing came down.’”
But for a 65-year-old retired New York State Park Police officer from Granville (along the state border with Vermont) who asked not to be named because he worried about going public with his belief in UFOs and extraterrestrial life, full acceptance still feels a ways off.
He urged city folks to stay calm should they see a UFO, just as he did one evening about 30 years ago, when, he said, he spotted a foot- ball-fields-long object floating beside the Taconic State Park- way as he finished a patrol shift. And most important, he said, people should not let fear of being mocked prevent them from reporting what they see.
If enough people report UFOs when they see them, he said, the world will believe they are telling the truth.