Well, It Looks Like Pretty Much Every Government Agency Was Complicit In The Raid Of A Small Town Newspaper

Legal Issues

from the isn't-conspiracy-a-crime? dept

Under the pretense of a computer crime investigation, the Marion County PD — led by then-Chief Gideon Cody — raided the offices of the Marion County Record, as well as the home of its 98-year-old co-owner, Joan Meyer. Joan Meyer died one day after the raid, one she strenuously objected to while her home was filled with law enforcement officers.

The raid quickly made national news. Shortly thereafter, the raid of a small town newspaper by cops became the subject of international reporting. Once the headlines started hitting, government figures moved quickly to distance themselves from this debacle.

The underlying incident began with local business owner Kari Newell, who was seeking to secure a liquor license for one of her businesses. At the same time, Newell was in the midst of a combative divorce. Her estranged husband allegedly tipped off the Marion County Record about her prior arrests for driving under the influence, as well as driving without a license. The newspaper tried to verify these allegations. First, reporters talked to the Marion County PD. Then it used a third-party site to look up Newell’s arrest record.

Somehow, this was treated as both identity fraud and computer-based crime by the PD. Chief Gideon Cody — who also knew his past misconduct was being investigated by the paper — and he helped generate the warrant affidavits and personally participated in the raid of the paper’s office. The warrant requests (only one of which was rejected) were approved by a local judge with her own history of DUI arrests.

County prosecutor Joel Ensey was the first to step away from the wreckage, declaring the warrants to be short on probable cause. He also asked the judge to issue an order directing the PD to return seized electronics to the journalists. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation announced it was now looking into the raids and the warrants supposedly justifying these raids.

The fallout just kept coming. The city council refused to discuss the debacle in council meetings. Chief Gideon Cody promoted himself to ex-chief by resigning rather than having to (publicly) justify his actions. Further investigation by other news agencies uncovered the fact that the city and PD discussed this raid using private email addresses and personal phones, leaving no permanent record of these communications.

Case in point: Chief Cody’s resignation letter was sent from his personal email address to the mayor’s personal email address. Business owner Kari Newell also told reporters the police chief has instructed her to delete any pre-raid communications between them.

Every bit of this reeks of corruption — the sort of small-town corruption where the perpetrators feel the locals are far too few, or far too weak, to fight back. And it gets worse. Sherman Smith and the Kansas Reflector have been digging into whatever they’ve actually been able to obtain with public records requests. And those documents show everyone was in on it… including the supposed neutral party now performing its own investigation of the raids: the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody enlisted the support of local and state law enforcement officials in the days before he led raids on the local newspaper office, the publisher’s home and the home of a city councilwoman.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation, Kansas Department of Revenue, Marion County Sheriff’s Office and the Office of the State Fire Marshal — along with the county attorney and a magistrate judge — were complicit in the Aug. 11 raid or knew it was imminent. But in the days that followed, they largely downplayed their involvement.

A whole bunch of people with government power using the public’s money conspired to violate rights apparently because they all believed — however temporarily — they might get away with it. When the small town paper fought back, most of those involved did everything they could to pretend they weren’t complicit.

That means a whole lot of people have been caught lying or, at the very least, pretending their refusal to directly address their involvement somehow absolves them of culpability. Here’s a brief summary of damning information the Kansas Reflector has obtained:

We now know there was also a KBI agent and his supervisor who had advance copies of the search warrants. A sheriff’s detective who wrote the search warrants. Department of Revenue staff who treated the reporter’s actions as criminal. And a fire marshal’s investigator who participated in the raid even though he seemed to realize it was unlawful.

I cannot even comprehend why a fire marshal decided he needed to assist in a police department raid, much less why he continued to do so when it became apparent the whole thing was a vindictive violation of rights.

The prosecutor who supposedly stepped up to rescind the warrants while claiming he was unaware of them has been revealed as a liar, coward, and an idiot. This is what he thought he would get away with if he distanced himself from this as soon as it became apparent the blowback would be too big to be ignored.

Cody, the police chief, had notified County Attorney Joel Ensey of his investigation in an Aug. 8 email, and sent copies of the search warrants to Ensey before taking them to a magistrate. A day after the raid, Ensey told Cody he would need to get a district court judge to sign the warrants so that the evidence seized during the raid could be reviewed by law enforcement outside of Marion.

“I also believe with the scrutiny this will receive, another judge reviewing the warrant would be a good idea, especially with some of the new information learned during the search,” Ensey said.

But as copies of the newspaper were being delivered around town on Aug. 16, and new subscribers streamed into the newspaper office, Ensey claimed he had reviewed the search warrants in detail on Aug. 14. He said there was insufficient evidence to support the raids and that items seized would be returned.

The prosecutor already knew what was in the warrants when he told reporters he had only now reviewed the affidavits and determined them to be unsupported by probable cause.

The records obtained by the Kansas Reflector also show the Kansas Bureau of Investigation opened its own investigation into the journalists and the paper’s owners. It did this following the Marion County PD’s request for assistance, one written by Chief Cody and emailed to the KBI on August 8.

While it never carried out any searches of its own, the KBI was thanked personally by Chief Gideon Cody for its “support” during the so-called investigation and raids. The documents also showed the KBI lied about its involvement in this shitstorm.

Attorney General Kris Kobach, who has oversight of the KBI, told reporters on Aug. 16 that the KBI “was not notified of the searches prior to their taking place.”

As for the ancillary presence of a fire marshal, there’s nothing to report because the marshal’s employer is either completely unable to explain his presence or simply would rather not talk about it.

A spokeswoman for the Office of the State Fire Marshal didn’t respond to questions for this story about why the legal memo is attached to Mercer’s report, or why he agreed to join an unlawful raid.

The legal memo — one from a law firm that firmly states the protections afforded to journalists under federal law — is attached to the fire marshal’s narrative of the search of Joan Meyer’s home. This narrative does no favors for local law enforcement officers, who are shown to be little more than thugs intimidating a 98-year-old woman just because they had a piece of paper saying they could.

This is a series of unforced errors that clearly indicates most of Marion County’s so-called public servants aren’t capable of serving the public, much less trustworthy enough to continue to collect paychecks signed by the people they’re supposed to be protecting and serving. Chief Cody has decided to exonerate himself by walking away from the mess he created. County attorney Joel Ensey has now been exposed as a liar and an opportunist. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation has made it clear it doesn’t care about the rights of the state’s residents. It’s garbage all the way down and all the way up.

And it’s how things are in most of America, despite constant efforts to reform law enforcement. The law is the law… unless the law might prevent cops from doing what they want to do. At that point, all bets are off.

Filed Under: eric meyer, gideon cody, joel ensey, kansas, kari newell, kbi, marion county, marion county pd