State investigators will probe police raid of Kansas newspaper office

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation has begun a criminal probe of the police raid of a newspaper office last week that has drawn outrage from journalists nationwide who see it as a violation of the First Amendment.

It’s not clear whether the state investigation is focused on the local officers who conducted the search at the Marion County Record or on the reporters and editors for the small weekly paper. The agency said it was asked by Marion police and the local county attorney to join an investigation into allegations of “illegal access and dissemination of confidential criminal justice information,” according to the Kansas City Star.

Officers in the Kansas town searched the newspaper’s offices and the home of a local councilwoman on Friday, seizing computers, cellphones and files. The 98-year-old co-owner of the newspaper, Joan Meyer, died a day after her house was also searched; the Record attributed her death to the stress of the event.

The search by Marion police and sheriff’s deputies — which Record editor Eric Meyer decried as “Gestapo tactics” — has elicited sweeping condemnation from press-freedom advocates, including the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which urged police to return seized material in a letter signed by The Washington Post and more than 30 news organizations and press groups. Advocates have cited state and federal laws protecting journalists, as well as the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on illegal searches and seizures by government officials. The Society of Professional Journalists offered Monday to help cover the Record’s legal fees.

The newspaper’s attorney protested the search in a letter Sunday to the town’s police chief, Gideon Cody, saying the seized material was protected under a state shield law, and later forwarded the letter to the KBI.

A KBI spokesperson told the Star that it was the “lead law enforcement agency” looking into the matter but offered no further details about what prompted the KBI to become involved or about the thrust of its investigation.

Criticism of the police raid has focused attention on Cody, who joined the small-town police force in April after wrapping up a 24-year career with the Kansas City Police Department.

Eric Meyer said later that the Record had been investigating allegations that Cody had been accused of sexual misconduct in Kansas City, Mo., but the paper had not yet published a story about it.

However, the police raid — led by Cody with four other Marion officers and two sheriff’s deputies — appears to have been triggered by an apparently unrelated matter.

The search warrant was issued by a local judge after a Marion restaurant owner, Kari Newell, alleged that one of the newspaper’s reporters had used an illegal computer search to obtain sealed state records about her arrest and citation for driving under the influence in 2008 — a disclosure she alleged was intended to scuttle her application for a liquor license. Journalists are “not exempt from the laws they blast others for not following,” Newell said in a statement last week.

Meyer denied last week that the paper had obtained the information — which the Record also had not previously published — through illicit means or shared it with a local council member, as Newell alleged. He said the records came from a source who separately leaked the information to the council member, whose home was also raided on Friday as part of the warrant.