Text Messages, Emails Show KBI Had Full Knowledge Of Raid On Kansas Newspaper’s Office

Legal Issues

from the ohhhhh-THAT-small-town-paper-raid dept
Tue, Dec 12th 2023 12:11pm - Tim Cushing

On August 11, the Marion County PD — with the assistance of the Kansas Department of Revenue, the county sheriff’s office, and (for some fucking reason) the local fire marshal — raided the office of the Marion County Record, along with the home of its co-owner, 98-year-old Joan Meyer.


The raid was prompted by the very expansive reading of two state laws, one involving identity fraud and the other involving computer crimes. The first response from nearly everyone but Police Chief Gideon Cody was a denial of knowledge, much less involvement.

But as reporters kept digging into the story, the denials — starting with the county attorney Joel Ensey’s claim of innocence when he asked a court to quash the warrants — began to unravel. The DA claimed he’d never seen the warrants prior to their service. But an email exposed this lie, showing Chief Cody had informed of his plans to search the paper’s office, as well as sent him copies of the warrants he planned to deploy.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation (KBI) strode onto the scene, presenting itself as a force of good, here to get to the bottom of this pile of constitutional violations.

It, too, claimed it had nothing to do with the raids.

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.”

That statement is, at best, misinformed. Perhaps Kobach just didn’t know. But the KBI sure did. It, too, had been informed of Chief Cody’s unconstitutional plans. Not only that, it apparently approved of them, as Jessica McMaster reports for KSHB:

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