Ex-police chief who led raid on Kansas newspaper charged with obstruction of justice

The former Kansas police chief who last year led a raid on a local newspaper has been charged with felony obstruction of justice, for allegedly persuading a potential witness to withhold information from investigators who at the time were pursuing a probe into the ex-chief’s own conduct.

Gideon Cody resigned from his position at the Marion Police Department in September 2023, less than two months after he spearheaded the beginnings of a criminal inquiry into the staff of a weekly newspaper, the Marion County Record, accusing them of committing identity theft, or a similar computer crime, for how they obtained reporting for a story that was never ultimately written. He’s faced a slew of of federal lawsuits since then over his conduct and the motivations behind it, which also sparked national criticism and conversations about journalistic rights and freedom of press in the U.S.

The criminal charge for obstruction of justice was filed Monday in Marion County District Court, shortly after two special prosecutors released an exhaustive 124-page report scrutinizing the original police inquiry into the newspaper and the convoluted context in which it unfolded. That report, authored by Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennet and Riley County Attorney Barry Wilkerson at the request of the district attorney in Marion, found that there wasn’t enough evidence to suggest that police, reporters or anyone else involved in the story or the raid had committed crimes under Kansas law. 

But they did conclude that some of Cody’s actions in the wake of the raid on the Marion County Record — one of multiple search warrants executed last August in relation to how the paper acquired personal information about an area restaurant owner’s driver’s license — illegally interfered with the state investigation that followed. Neither the special prosecutors’ report nor the criminal complaint against Cody offered many details as to what exactly he’s accused of doing, although the report mentioned that Cody allegedly instructed the business owner, Kari Newell, to delete text messages they’d exchanged after the raids were carried out.

Special prosecutors said that Marion City Administrator Brogan Jones heard from several city attorneys on Sept. 29, 2023, who informed him that Cody had given the instruction to Newell, the restaurant owner, once he’d executed search warrants on the newspaper headquarters and the publisher’s home in August. The mayor placed Cody on administrative leave from the Marion police force that same day, and on Oct. 2, Cody resigned.

The report explicitly said it would not provide more information about the nature of the text messages or his alleged persuasion to delete them, which Newell herself corroborated in comments to the Associated Press, but prosecutors noted that there was probable cause to bring an obstruction of justice charge over the text messaging issue. 

In the criminal complaint, Marion County prosecutor Barry Wilkerson alleged that it stemmed from conduct between Aug. 11 and Aug. 17 of last year, where Cody “knowingly or intentionally … induced a witness to withhold information” in the midst of a felony criminal investigation.

CBS News contacted a team of attorneys representing Cody in one of the federal civil lawsuits against him for comment, or more information about his legal representation in the criminal case, but did not receive an immediate reply.

Cody originally sought and carried out search warrants on the Marion County Record, the home of its publisher Eric Meyer and the home of Marion City Council Member Ruth Herbel, after learning that journalists at the newspaper had obtained Newell’s driver’s license records, while following a tip that suggested she did not have a valid one because of a DUI more than a decade earlier. 

Because she owned a local restaurant and was in the process of applying for a liquor license, efforts were made to verify the legitimacy of a driving record that appeared to show she hadn’t driven with a valid license for all those years. They ultimately didn’t pursue a story because a copy of the record was first shared with the newspaper by her estranged husband while divorce proceedings were underway, and involving the press in that situation didn’t seem necessary, the journalists later told authorities.

Cody went on to claim that he had evidence the publisher and a reporter had broken the law while trying to verify the driving record. The subsequent police raids, to seize materials that would supposedly support that claim, were heavily scrutinized. Body camera footage of the raid on Meyer’s home, where his 98-year-old mother and newspaper co-owner Joan Meyer also lived, showed her visibly distressed by the ordeal that preceded her death one day later. Her son has blamed his mother’s death on the raid and the stress that it caused her.