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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.
Luke Nozicka/The Kansas City Star/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
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.
Former President Donald Trump on Sunday repeated a false claim that officials in Lancaster County in Pennsylvania found 2,600 fraudulent ballots written by the same person.
Trump is referencing a review of about 2,500 voter registration applications flagged for potential fraud in Lancaster County. Preliminary findings indicate that detectives identified hundreds of fraudulent applications and hundreds more that they were unable to verify.
The applications were connected to a large canvassing effort to register voters, officials said. As of Nov. 4, no suspects have been identified.
Voter registration forms are not the same as ballots and the forms were identified before processing, officials said.
Trump has repeatedly and falsely alleged that the voter registration applications were ballots as he argued that it was proof of widespread voter fraud in the crucial battleground state.
At least six counties in Pennsylvania have announced investigations into possibly fraudulent voter registration or mail-in ballot applications.
CBS News election law contributor David Becker told CBS News Philadelphia that this shows the vetting system in the commonwealth is working, and that there are “checks and balances to ensure there is no widespread fraud.”
“The election officials were diligent. They found some voter registration forms that did not look right. They flagged them. Some of them were legitimate…others they did not process. So no fraudulent voters are going to vote as a result of that,” Becker said.
Here’s what we know about the investigation.
Lancaster County
Officials said about 2,500 voter registration applications were identified as potentially fraudulent due to identical handwriting on some applications, same-day submissions, and suspicious signatures. Of that figure, officials say just over 400 of those applications were fraudulent.
DA Heather Adams reported some forms had forged or false information. Commissioner Ray D’Agostino said 57% of flagged applications were verified, with 17% confirmed as fraudulent, and 26% are still under review, mostly suspected as being fraudulent.
York County
The DA’s office is investigating a quarter of 3,087 suspicious voter registration forms. The York County Board of Election said so far, 47% have been found to be legitimate, 29% have incomplete information, and 24% remain under investigation. Of those, 85% are duplicate requests.
York County Chief Clerk Greg Monskie told CBS News on Friday that the forms were submitted by Field + Media Corps, an Arizona based voter outreach firm, and that the forms were all received in one batch.
The news outlet Votebeat previously reported Monskie as saying that Field + Media Corps had submitted the forms on behalf of the Everybody Votes campaign, a national voter registration organization.
The Everybody Votes campaign told CBS News on Friday that it had “not been contacted by officials in Lancaster, York, or Monroe counties about any ongoing investigations and have no additional information on the forms in question. Our partners work diligently to ensure all forms collected comply with all rules and regulations.”
Monroe County
Monroe County DA Mike Mancuso said the County Board of Elections identified 30 voter registration and mail-in ballot request forms as “irregular.”
The DA’s office is investigating the ballots as they were not authorized by the person named as the applicant. In one case, a named applicant is dead, he said. Several forms have been traced to a specific person, he said.
Mancuso said 21 forms were submitted by a Lancaster-based subsidiary of Field + Media Corps. Of those, 16 have been found to be fraudulent, he said on Nov 2.
Cambria County
Cambria County president commissioner Scott Hunt said 21 voter registration requests were flagged as fraudulent because information like social security numbers or addresses was inconsistent, and the people named did not respond to letters sent automatically by the system.
When no one responded, investigators went to the addresses listed on the forms and were told either that the person named did not live there, or did not submit the form, he said.
Lehigh County
The Lehigh County District Attorney’s office said it is investigating suspicious voter registration applications.
DA Gavin Holihan told CBS News that around 40% of applications received around the deadline were invalid, and that number was likely to increase.
The county received between 2,500 and 3,000, he said. Around 1,500 were from one organization, local media reported.
Berks County
The Pennsylvania AG Michelle Henry said Berks County was among the counties where there had been “apparent attempts to submit fraudulent voter registration forms.”
County officials had flagged around 1,300 registrations as suspicious, according to local reporting from WFMZ-TV.
“I want to be clear, these are voter registration forms — people’s applications to vote,” District Attorney John Adams reportedly said Friday in a phone call interview with local Pennsylvania news outlet Daily Voice. “These are not ballots.”
Taylor Swift Eras Tour concerts tickets don’t come easy, or cheap. For fans of the superstar who manage to snag tickets, the thought of losing them never crosses their mind. But that’s exactly what’s happening to Swifties nationwide as hackers target Ticketmaster accounts, stealing customers’ tickets for resale on other sites.
“It was like that gut punch,” Morgen Bernius, a Maryland mom, told CBS News national consumer correspondent Usher Qurashi in describing the moment she discovered the Taylor Swift tickets she purchased for her daughter had suddenly disappeared from her Ticketmaster account.
“The tickets are gone — gone,” said Bernius, adding that she could cry just thinking about it. “It was devastating,” she added.
Ticketmaster won’t say how many people have had their tickets stolen, reported Qurashi, but accounts of ticket theft similar to Bernius’ have rippled throughout social media over the past month. “I woke up and my tickets had been ‘successfully’ transferred,” said another theft victim, using air quotes.
“The No.1 tip I could give to fans to protect themselves is to make sure they have a secure, unique password, that they are not using on other platforms,” Kaitlyn Henrich, head of global at Live Nation Entertainment, parent company of Ticketmaster, told Qurashi.
Asked if the company has failed its customers, Henrich added, “We are constantly striving to look at what’s going on and improve the experience.”
For now, that experience includes a 48-hour average wait for fans to have their tickets restored after notifying the company of their disappearance. As an added precaution, Ticketmaster is limiting ticket transfers to 72 hours before Eras Tour concerts and requiring two-factor authentication for some transactions.
“It’s a very small percent, less than a tenth of one percent,” said Henrich, “but obviously for that one fan who’s going through that, it’s a really stressful situation.”
Online ticket thefts also hurt those who unknowingly purchase tickets that had been stolen.
Karen Perry, who paid more than $4,000 for two seats on StubHub to see the Eras Tour in New Orleans, got an email from TicketMaster just weeks before the show informing her that her tickets were stolen and would be returned to the original buyer.
“The tickets that were transferred to you were acquired by someone who was attempting to steal tickets. As a result, they have been cancelled and returned to the original ticket holder,” the letter read.
“My heart dropped, like, my stomach sank,” Perry told Qurashi. “Like, I was at work and I instantly started crying.”
StubHub says Ticketmaster never informed them about the customer thefts, which it only found out about through media reports.
“I think that if there was a world where, for example, we would see Ticketmaster be more collaborative, or more transparent, about the problems they’re having, and how they’re attempting to solve those problems, we could be a partner in that effort,” Laura Dooley of StubHub told Qurashi.
What you can do to protect yourself
Experts say there are several steps ticket buyers can take to reduce the odds of getting ripped off.
- Check early and often that your tickets are still in your account and haven’t been transferred.
- Buy from sellers who offer replacement or refund guarantees.
- Take screenshots of all of your purchases.
As for Perry, who unknowingly purchased stolen tickets off of StubHub, she was able to find new seats with the help of the company, and was able to catch Swift in action in mid-October.
“We just had the best night of our entire lives,” Perry said. “Hands down. It was better than our wedding. It was so good.”
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