The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.
The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.
The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead. Viar didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story or explain why she would authorize a potentially illegal raid.
It's all the hallmarks of shitty small town America. A police force literally smaller than a football team acting like a gang. Attacking independent journalism. Drunk driving, suspended/no license. And a Judge violating federal law. It's a perfect storm.
This is my hometown and unfortunately this is just the most recent escalation. Mayor Mayfield and most conservatives in the area have it out for the Record and have been causing all sorts of chaos at City Council meetings.
This isn’t the only scandal the Record was investigating either. The director of the hospital quit amidst a brewing scandal from over billing the local pharmacy while trying to open a competing pharmacy through family. Of course it’s all mixed up with local politics. People don’t like journalists asking difficult questions and don’t think the rules apply to them.
Some petty ass old boys network tries to strong arm local journalist nerd over some Facebook wall drama about a DUI, fails to consider the size his microphone.
That take is only accurate in a country where this kind of thing is an anomaly. If this is allowed to stand, then it will become normal. I don’t want to live in a country without a free and independent press.
Except it might not be about the DUI. I had been thinking that the restaurant owner approached the cops to harass the newspaper because of the DUI. But now I'm thinking that maybe the cops approached the restaurant owner to get information so they could swear out an illegal warrant for their own ends.
The following is courtesy of @roguetrick in one of the other threads:
EM: So the backstory that we haven't told, because we don't wanna get in trouble, is that we've been investigating the police chief [Gideon Cody]. When he was named Chief just two months ago, we got an outpouring of calls from his former co-workers making a wide array of allegations against him saying that he was about to be demoted at his previous job and that he retired to avoid demotion and punishment over sexual misconduct charges and other things.
We had half a dozen or more different anonymous sources calling in about that. Well, we never ran that because we never could get any of them to go on the record, and we never could get his personnel file. But the allegations—including the identities of who made the allegations—were on one of the computers that got seized. I may be paranoid that this has anything to do with it, but when people come and seize your computer, you tend to be a little paranoid.
I get using religious music in choir; if you’re going to teach early music, the vast (surviving) majority is sacred.
Likewise I understand using the Bible as a reference in school as part of both a history of literature and a comparative religions course.
I don’t know any non-religious people trying to stop kids from being able to pray in school.
What we are against is allowing teachers to take our kids as a captive audience and then try to indoctrinate them into their fundamentalist flavor of conservative reactionary bullshit.
I think with the prayer its wierd if they are being lead in it, but time for each individual to use for personal prayer or reflection is fine. Religious choral music often has less religious classical originals. joyful joyful we adore thee is bethovens 9th and while it mentions god it also does goddess and eleysium and is more pagan in feel. bible is fine as a refernce provided other refrences are used for other equally big religions like the koran, buddhist and hindu texts, etc. Its like using the bible directly and just using snippets from other sources would seem bs.
Meyer reported last week that Marion restaurant owner Kari Newell had kicked newspaper staff out of a public forum with LaTurner[US rep], whose staff was apologetic. Newell responded to Meyer’s reporting with hostile comments on her personal Facebook page. A confidential source contacted the newspaper, Meyer said, and provided evidence that Newell had been convicted of drunken driving and continued to use her vehicle without a driver’s license. The criminal record could jeopardize her efforts to obtain a liquor license for her catering business.
So, the beef was that they posted an unflattering- but true- article about somebody that was hosting a thing for a politician. Gotcha.
The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead. Viar didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story or explain why she would authorize a potentially illegal raid.
The answer is obvious, isn’t it? politicians leaning on judges to protect supporters from criminal action.
Virtually no laws are enforceable unless there's a defining moment whereby someone becomes a person. Likewise, all laws regulating processing the dead and donation of organs are thrown into limbo without legal definitions of when a person is dead.
Farr dreamed of joining Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a third-party alternative to the inevitable rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump in next year’s presidential election.
Like RFK Jr., Farr refuses to believe the avalanche of credible evidence that shows the COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective.
There’s another reason she believes they would be natural running mates. The way Farr sees it, President Lyndon Johnson was responsible for killing both her father and RFK Jr.’s uncle.
Ohhh, she's a crackpot, I get it now.
Farr envisioned a “Camelot 2.0,” in which she would provide reparations for families who lost a loved one from COVID-19 or the vaccines, remove innocent people like herself from the terrorist watch list, and introduce a “justice amendment” to the U.S. Constitution that would level the playing field between the rich and poor.
I was going to make a joke that she's one of the people Reagan so generously freed from the asylums, but oh no...
Last year, when she took advantage of a loophole that allowed her to file for U.S. Senate races in two states, U.S. Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma tried to have her committed to a mental health institution, she claimed. And she believes Moran schemed with Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab to flip votes.
Farr sued Inhofe, Moran, Schwab, the CIA, the FBI and the IRS, along with various other state and federal entities, after her stinging defeats in both Oklahoma and Kansas. She represented herself in the case, as she had done with two previous lawsuits that had been dismissed earlier in 2022.
Clay Barker, general counsel to Schwab, referenced Farr’s lawsuit when he appeared last week before a special elections committee. As lawmakers courted conspiracy theories, Barker tried to convince them of the integrity of Kansas elections.
Barker talked about the absurdity of claims brought by people like Farr, who also had tried to convince Crabtree that the CIA used cloaks of invisibility to infiltrate her home and steal the secret algorithm that allows officials to control the outcome of elections.
Props to the editors of the Kansas Reflector, I don't know how you played this article so straight. It's just... pure gold.
EM: So the backstory that we haven't told, because we don't wanna get in trouble, is that we've been investigating the police chief [Gideon Cody]. When he was named Chief just two months ago, we got an outpouring of calls from his former co-workers making a wide array of allegations against him saying that he was about to be demoted at his previous job and that he retired to avoid demotion and punishment over sexual misconduct charges and other things.
We had half a dozen or more different anonymous sources calling in about that. Well, we never ran that because we never could get any of them to go on the record, and we never could get his personnel file. But the allegations—including the identities of who made the allegations—were on one of the computers that got seized. I may be paranoid that this has anything to do with it, but when people come and seize your computer, you tend to be a little paranoid.
I'm hijacking the top comment to add in some sad news from The Daily Beast:
[The] 98-year-old [newspaper] co-owner has now died after she was left “stressed beyond her limits.” Joan Meyer “collapsed Saturday afternoon and died at her home,” the Marion County Record reported, noting that she had been “in good health for her age."
A confidential source contacted the newspaper, Meyer said, and provided evidence that Newell had been convicted of drunken driving and continued to use her vehicle without a driver’s license. The criminal record could jeopardize her efforts to obtain a liquor license for her catering business.
A reporter with the Marion Record used a state website to verify the information provided by the source. But Meyer suspected the source was relaying information from Newell’s husband, who had filed for divorce. Meyer decided not to publish a story about the information, and he alerted police to the situation.
Ignoring all the obvious issues with the legality of a search in general, this was all triggered by the newspaper using discretion and not publishing the story?
How the fuck do you think that's going to serve your needs?
Man, the ACLU is gonna have a field day with this one. And Newell should be charged with making a fake police report:
The search warrant identifies two pages worth of items that law enforcement officers were allowed to seize, including computer software and hardware, digital communications, cellular networks, servers and hard drives, items with passwords, utility records, and all documents and records pertaining to Newell. The warrant specifically targeted ownership of computers capable of being used to “participate in the identity theft of Kari Newell.”
She's claiming that because Meyer did research on her, he's participating in identity theft. Great job at keeping this story out of the papers, Newell, now everyone knows you're a drunk-driving criminal with no respect to for the rule of law or freedom of the press. Welcome to the Streisand effect.
It wasn't just her. What happened was the paper said the police knew she didn't have a license and gave her a pass. The cops decided to punish the paper for calling out their corruption. Everything else just flows from incompetence, from the attorney general's office to the judge.
I hear you there - there's plenty of dumbfuckery laced throughout this story. I just wanted to draw out that particular piece of stupid in my comment, because it's clear that this drunken trash heap of a human being is the root of the entire brouhaha.
That's a good find. Unfortunately for that chief, he seems to have a talent for lighting his problems on fire instead of burying them. What could have been a quiet little small town scandal blew up to become national news. Good work, chief!
And the greatest irony to me is that the newspaper reported on NONE of this. OK, they did cover the story where Karin went off the rails and aired her own dirty laundry at the town council meeting, but it's not like that was any sort of secret.
Uh, so far as I'm aware, all cops do that - pull over "suspicious" vehicles on minor offenses or equipment violations, use that as a wedge to "observe the driver acting nervously" and maybe "detect the odor of marijuana." You get to collect revenue or shoo off "undesirables" at worst, both is even better, and sometimes you get free drugs.
I mean, it's not too much of a stretch to think that supervisors whose departments are getting increased revenue from dodgy traffic stops just might not look real hard at the patrol officers supplying those stops when they're "confiscating narcotics" on the street, or "checking something into evidence" at the station.
The OP commenter may have edited their comment. I seem to recall it being worded slightly differently, giving it a possible connotation that this specific jurisdiction was "guilty of conspiracy to benefit politically and financially by systemically violating civil rights" in a way that other jurisdictions are not.
I believe the phrase "guilty of conspiracy" replaced the original "trained."
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