FBI’s Gestapo tactics now spreading, starting with a police raid at a small newpaper in

Last month, I had the privilege of spending several days in Topeka, Kansas.

I visited the statehouse to see its famed art collections.  I had a delightful chance encounter with state senator Mary Ware of Wichita in the elevator on my way back home, who, though I was bedraggled and tired, was pure warm-hearted welcome even after her own long day at work.  She was a Democrat, but she didn’t care what my party was.  She wanted to know what I thought of Kansas, as it was my first trip.  I told her loved her beautiful state.  She beamed and observed: “There’s a lot more here than people think.”

She can say that again.

Here’s the news of what’s going on just an hour and a half northeast of her own 25th state Senate district, according to the Associated Press:

MARION, Kan. (AP) — A small central Kansas police department is facing a torrent of criticism for raiding a local newspaper’s office and the home of its owner and publisher, seizing computers and cellphones, and, in the publisher’s view, stressing his 98-year-old mother enough to cause her weekend death.

Several press freedom watchdogs condemned the Marion Police Department’s actions as a blatant violation of the U.S. Constitution’s protection for a free press. The Marion County Record’s editor and publisher, Eric Meyer, worked with his staff Sunday to reconstruct stories, ads and other materials for its next edition Wednesday, even as he took time in the afternoon to provide a local funeral home with information about his mother, Joan, the paper’s co-owner.

A search warrant tied Friday morning raids, led by Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody, to a dispute between the newspaper and a local restaurant owner, Kari Newell. She is accusing the newspaper of invading her privacy and illegally accessing information about her and her driving record and suggested that the newspaper targeted her after she threw Meyer and a reporter out of restaurant during a political event.

The details of what seemed to be going on, based on the reports out there, suggest that the restaurant owner seemed to be in cahoots with the local police and was going through a divorce with an angry ex-husband who was accused of leaking her driving record to the Marion County Record.  Those records revealed that she was driving on a suspended license after a drunk driving conviction, and the cops were doing nothing about it.

Obviously, there are two sides to this story, and the punishment meted to her may have been outrageously draconian, given the wide open spans of rural Kansas that I saw and the absence of public transportation, which probably would have been a business death sentence to a small restaurant owner.  Maybe the cops understood this and looked for other kinds of crooks instead.  Maybe something else was going on, though, such as her being in cahoots with the local cops in a two-tier justice system where some get punished and some do not.

The 2,000-circulation small-town paper did have the information yet didn’t publish it because they had suspicions about the motive of the source and the legality of how the information had been obtained, given that the restaurant owner was involved in an acrimonious divorce.

They did run a piece from a city council meeting, though, where the restaurant owner publicly admitted she had a DUI and was driving on a suspended license.  That was obviously in the public interest, and they probably derived that based on the other information they had.

Yet just having the information prompted a bona fide police raid on the entire newspaper as well as the co-owner’s home, much the same way “little dictator” Daniel Ortega of Marxist banana republic Nicaragua used to have his goons raid La Prensa for negative coverage in order to shut the free press down.  The publisher’s 98-year-old mother, a little old lady who wrote a popular “Memories” column based on her searches of the old paper’s microfilm archives, actually died of stress, according to her son, Eric, who is the working publisher.

It’s obvious that Eric Meyer is an old-line newspaperman of the kind we rarely see anymore, who digs deep and reports professionally without fear or favor.  This interview of him by the National Newspaper Association Foundation from two years ago tells us that.  People like him inspired me to go into journalism myself.  He was no obnoxious excuse for a “journalist” that we see in some of today’s wokester reporters who view facts as optional and “narratives” as priorities.

Nevertheless, as the Guardian notes in its report, the paper got raided by the cops, and the publisher’s elderly mother died of stress from it, all because someone leaked to them, which was hardly something they could control, and because supposedly the news was going around the small towns of the county anyway, printed or not.  That’s weird stuff, given that the restaurant owner did make public statements about her driving record.

What a crappy premise for a raid.

The cops said they were right to do the raid because the law lets them raid anyone suspected of a crime.  The problem with that is obvious:

Seth Stern of the Freedom of the Press Foundation told the New York Times: “You can’t say, ‘I’m allowed to raid the newsroom because I’m investigating a crime’ if the crime you’re investigating is journalism.”

That idiot logic from the cops is pretty obvious.  It’s also pretty shameless.

These kinds of raids didn’t use to happen in this country.  Why are they happening now?

Maybe it’s because the fish stinks from the head down, and over in Washington, there have been some outrageous attacks on freedom of the press as well as Gestapo tactics from the FBI targeted at political opponents.

Might that have just set the tone about what’s permissible, how the standards are lowered?

The cop chief, Gideon Cody, is a city boy from Kansas City and cut his ethical teeth as a cop in that big-blue-city environment, which Meyer now says the paper’s looking into, as it should.

While Meyer saw Newell’s complaints — which he said were untrue — as prompting the raids, he also believes the newspaper’s aggressive coverage of local politics and issues played a role. He said the newspaper was examining Cody’s past work with the Kansas City, Missouri, police as well.

To the mainstream media’s credit, some of the big publications did step in and condemn this tinhorn-dictatorship behavior, which is quite unprecedented:

The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (the “Reporters Committee”) and the undersigned 34 news media and press freedom organizations write to condemn that raid. Newsroom searches and seizures are among the most intrusive actions law enforcement can take with respect to the free press, and the most potentially suppressive of free speech by the press and the public.

“Based on public reporting, the search warrant that has been published online, and your public statements to the press, there appears to be no justification for the breadth and intrusiveness of the search — particularly when other investigative steps may have been available — and we are concerned that it may have violated federal law strictly limiting federal, state, and local law enforcement’s ability to conduct newsroom searches. We urge you to immediately return the seized material to the Record, to purge any records that may already have been accessed, and to initiate a full independent and transparent review of your department’s actions.

“As detailed in the search warrant, on Friday your department executed a warrant at the Record’s offices and at the home of its owner and publisher that authorized the seizure and forensic search of electronic media, as well as the confiscation of journalistic work product and documentary material related to a named individual. 

“Your department’s seizure of this equipment has substantially interfered with the Record’s First Amendment-protected news gathering in this instance, and the department’s actions risk chilling the free flow of information in the public interest more broadly, including by dissuading sources from speaking to the Record and other Kansas news media in the future.

“Further, as you acknowledge in your public statement, the federal Privacy Protection Act of 1980 (the “PPA”) protects that flow of information to journalists by prohibiting law enforcement, including local agencies, from searching for or seizing journalistic work product1 or documentary materials, except in narrow, exceptional circumstances. See Pub. L. No. 96-440, 94 Stat. 1879 (1980), codified at 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000aa, 2000aa-5 to 2000aa-7.

Publisher Eric Meyer compared it to dictatorship…