Madison KS city council refuses to address newspaper raid

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City council members in Marion, Kansas where police raided a small newspaper and seized documents, computers and cell phones earlier this month are making it clear they will not discuss the scandal at their scheduled meeting Monday — and they used 47 exclamation points to do so.

The council agenda stated, in all capital letters, that there would be no talk of the criminal investigation concerning the Marion County Record.

Mayor David Mayfield, who has been openly critical of the Record, will not attend the meeting.

“COUNCIL WILL NOT COMMENT ON THE ONGOING CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION AT THIS MEETING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” the agenda says, according to the Kansas City Star.

The Marion County Record made big-time headlines after Police Chief Gideon Cody and every cop from the department stormed its newsroom Aug. 11.

The raid came amid the paper’s investigation into allegations that Cody, 54, had retired from his last police job to avoid demotion over sexual misconduct.

Stephen McAllister, a U.S. attorney for Kansas during former President Donald Trump’s administration, said the raid opened Cody, the city and others to lawsuits for alleged civil right violations.

And, he added, “We also have some exposure to federal criminal prosecution.”

“I would be surprised if they are not looking at this, if they haven’t already been asked by various interests to look at it, and I would think they would take it seriously,” McAllister, a University of Kansas law professor who also served as the state’s solicitor general, said of federal officials.

Owner and publisher Eric Meyer, whose 98-year-old mother Joan died as a result of stress and grief shortly after the raid, also chalked up the police action to “long-standing animosities” between different parties in the town, including the newspaper, the vice mayor and restaurateur Kari Newell.

An unknown party had leaked documents to the paper and Vice Mayor Ruth Herbel showing that Newell had a DUI on her record and was driving without a license, which would have made it illegal for her to have a liquor license.

The Marion County Record never published the story, instead alerting police and suggesting a bad-faith actor related to her ex-husband was involved in the leak.  

Meyer said that despite the paper being open to cooperating with the cops, the police never reached out or asked for the document.

But the investigation into whether the newspaper broke state laws as far as possible data breaches and so-called “identity theft” continues, now led by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation.

With Post wires