Authorities to Return Materials Seized From Kansas Newspaper

The Marion County attorney has agreed to withdraw a search warrant and asked that all seized computers and cellphones be returned to a small central Kansas newspaper, after a raid on the outlet’s office and the home of its owners last week prompted national outrage from advocates for a free press and experts in First Amendment law. 

Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey said that he had reviewed the warrant applications made for the searches but upon further review had found “insufficient evidence exists to establish a legally sufficient nexus between this alleged crime and the places searched and the items seized.” 

Melissa Underwood, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which on Monday took over the case that sparked the search warrant in Marion, said that investigation would proceed without examining any of the items that were taken. 

Bernie Rhodes, the lawyer for the local newspaper, said the decision to return seized devices was a step in the right direction but did nothing to satisfy the First Amendment violations that occurred when the search was executed Friday. 

He also said it wouldn’t bring back Joan Meyer, the 98-year-old co-owner of the paper who died one day after police officers and sheriff’s deputies searched the home she shared with her son, Eric Meyer, who is the paper’s co-owner, editor and publisher.

The paper intends to sue for damages, Rhodes said.

Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody didn’t respond to a request for comment but previously said he believed the local judicial system would be vindicated once all of the facts in the case were made public.

The newspaper, called the Marion County Record, is based in Marion, a city of 1,900 people about an hour’s drive north of Wichita, Kan. The Meyer family purchased it in 1998. Meyer’s father had worked there starting in 1948.

Meyer took over as editor of the paper during the pandemic, after retiring from a career that included teaching journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and editing the Milwaukee Journal. He doesn’t take a salary but participates in an employee-profit-sharing plan.

Meyer said he wanted to make residents care about local issues “with the goal of reinvigorating the community because there was a lot of secrecy.” The paper scrutinized local officials and investigated the local police chief before he was sworn into office in the spring.

Despite a national outpouring of support that has left staff struggling to keep up with entering new subscriptions, Meyer said the paper has heard from few Marion residents.

“Part of it’s because they’re afraid in a small town—that if they cross the powers-that-be, they will get punished, which to an extent is kind of what’s happened to us,” he said in a weekend interview. “We now are in the position of saying, you know, we can’t take this lying down.”

The case in Marion began Aug. 1, when local restaurateur Kari Newell asked Meyer and a Record reporter to leave a public meet-and-greet with Rep. Jake LaTurner (R., Kan.), held at one of her food establishments.

A source reached out to the reporter on Facebook after the event, suggesting Newell had been driving without a license after an impaired-driving conviction 15 years ago.

The source later shared through Facebook Messenger a copy of a letter addressed to Newell from the Kansas Department of Revenue that outlined how Newell could get her driver’s license back, Meyer said.

The Record reporter used Newell’s date of birth and driver’s license—but the reporter’s own name—to find the document on a state website to verify its authenticity, he said.

The paper decided not to publish an article, in part because the source is connected to Newell’s husband, with whom she is engaged in divorce proceedings.

The source separately provided the same information to Councilwoman Ruth Herbel, whose home also was raided last week. Herbel declined to comment.

Herbel passed the information along to at least one city staff member ahead of a meeting to approve Newell’s application for a liquor license, which could be precluded by an impaired driving charge, Meyer said.

At that city council meeting on Aug, 7, Newell accused the newspaper of sharing her driving records with Herbel.

Meyer said neither he nor the reporter who received the tip shared the personal information or downloaded it from the state website.

He had, however, told the police chief and the county sheriff about the document, saying in an email a few days before the city council meeting that the news outlet didn’t intend to publish a story, Meyer said. He didn’t mention Newell’s name in that email, he said.

“Someone sent it to us,” he said at the city council meeting, after Newell said her private information had been exposed. “We were concerned about having received it for precisely the reasons that she states.”

A few days later, Marion police officers and sheriff’s deputies simultaneously showed up at the news outlet’s office and at the house Meyer shared with his mother, with a search warrant signed by Eighth Judicial District Magistrate Judge Laura Viar. The warrant cited correspondence and documents tied to Newell.

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and more than 30 news organizations, including the New York Times, Dow Jones (parent company of The Wall Street Journal) and the Washington Post, have written to the chief of the Marion Police Department to condemn its raid on the Record.

“We look forward to the results of the forensic analysis”—which will check if any information was accessed—said Rhodes, the newspaper’s lawyer, “and will closely monitor this case as it moves forward.”

Newell, whose liquor license was approved by the city, didn’t respond to a request for comment Wednesday but has previously said she felt the Record was an unreliable source of news and wanted to put her out of business. She said she had gathered screenshots of posts describing instances of the Record “twisting somebody’s story, somebody’s quote. And that was literally the reason that they were not welcome at the meet-and-greet.”

She said she didn’t know the raid would happen and was out of town when it occurred. She also said she has received nasty messages and her restaurants have been targeted by fake online reviews.

Legal experts and advocates for press freedom said the raids likely violated a privacy-protection act Congress passed in 1980 that requires law-enforcement officials to get a subpoena for reporters’ work product rather than a search warrant that cannot be challenged in court beforehand. There are exceptions if the journalists are believed to be involved in criminal activity.

RonNell Andersen Jones, a University of Utah law professor who specializes in media law, said the decision to withdraw the search warrant was the “right result too late.”

“News gatherers’ sources might well dry up if they had to operate under the anxiety of worrying that the government could sweep in at any moment and have access to materials that are used by journalists,” she said.

The Record, meanwhile, published its weekly edition on Wednesday with the headline “SEIZED…but not silenced.”

Write to Shannon Najmabadi at [email protected]