MAGA

In an unprecedented raid Friday, local law enforcement seized computers, cellphones and reporting materials from the Marion County Record office, the newspaper’s reporters, and the publisher [Eric Meyer]’s home.

Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”

  Kansas Reflector

What's the matter with Kansas?

“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer said, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”

[...]

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 [Marion restaurant owner Kari Newell] who kicked reporters out of a [public] meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner [whose staff was apologetic], and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.

[...]

The criminal record could jeopardize her efforts to obtain a liquor license for her catering business.

[...]

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.

Is impeachment in order?

“An attack on a newspaper office through an illegal search is not just an infringement on the rights of journalists but an assault on the very foundation of democracy and the public’s right to know,” [Emily Bradbury, executive director of the Kansas Press Association,] said. “This cannot be allowed to stand.”

And it probably won't. But it's still able to have its chilling effect. There should be some very serious penalties when this is all over.

As a journalism professor in Illinois, Meyer said, he had graduate students from Egypt who talked about how people would come into the newspaper office and seize everything so they couldn’t publish. Those students presented a scholarly paper at a conference in Toronto about what it has done to journalism there.

“That’s basically what they’re trying to do here,” Meyer said. “The intervention is just like that repressive government of Egypt. I didn’t think it could happen in America.”

Seriously?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 08/14/2023: