Secret documents spur new allegations in raid

By ERIC MEYER

Staff writer

More than 50,000 pages of previously secret documents have led to new allegations about disavowed raids Aug. 11, 2023, on the Record newsroom and two Marion homes.

Agents from the Kansas and Colorado Bureaus of Investigation gathered the material during 10 months of interviews and records searches focused on handling of the raids.

Gideon Cody, Marion’s now suspended and resigned police chief who faces obstruction charges, led the raids after obtaining warrants later withdrawn as unjustified.

Along with the Record newsroom and its co-owner’s home, the home of Ron and Ruth Herbel was targeted in the raids.

At the time, Ruth Herbel was a city council member bitterly opposed by Mayor David Mayfield.

In documents filed Friday, attorneys for the Herbels cite KBI and CBI evidence in arguing to reinstate federal civil rights violations alleged against these individuals:

Sheriff Jeff Soyez

According to the Herbels’ attorneys, Sheriff Jeff Soyez was intimately involved in helping Cody plan the raids.

Despite his denials, the attorneys say, Soyez led meetings, contributed ideas, assigned roles to deputies, and repeatedly advised Cody.

They cite KBI and CBI evidence that Soyez informed Mayfield of the impending raids three days in advance and conferred with Cody daily by text and telephone and in person.

Two days before the raids, Soyez and Cody jointly briefed KBI agents. The agents advised against search warrants, but Cody and Soyez continued to confer after the agents left and decided to ignore their advice, the Herbels’ motion states.

A day before the raid, according to KBI and CBI documents, Soyez bragged to Marion City Council member Zach Collett, a close Mayfield ally, that Soyez had obtained the warrants even though they had not yet been signed and Collett supposedly was not involved in the investigation.

Before sending officers to execute the warrants, Soyez assured those conducting the search that “people are behind them,” “it is highly supported,” and KBI was “super supportive,” the motion quotes KBI and CBI reports as saying.

According to KBI and CBI interviews, Soyez stated that he was pursuing the matter because restaurant owner Keri Newell, whose status as an illegal driver had been leaked to Herbel and the Record by Pam Maag, wanted to “go for blood.”

Even after the raids were disavowed, the KBI and CBI reports say, Soyez encouraged Cody to confer with Mayfield and KBI agents about charging Herbel with public corruption for her questioning of whether Newell’s driving status might impact Newell’s attempt to obtain a liquor license.

Newell’s license had been suspended because of an unresolved drunken driving conviction.

Most damaging, according to the KBI and CBI reports cited in the motion, is that Soyez knew before the warrant applications were submitted that Newell’s driving record was legally available to the general public.

The documents indicate that an office assistant had shown him how to obtain it legally, as the Record had done to verify what Maag had provided.

Despite this knowledge, the warrant applications that he and Cody worked on made no mention of possible legal access and instead suggested that the Record had used illegal means to obtain the document, which it did not plan to use, and then had supplied the document to Herbel.

The lawyers’ motion cites KBI and CBI evidence that Soyez conferred “constantly” with his deputies, rejected concerns by one of them that the raid might raise First Amendment issues, and reviewed drafts of arrest warrants for Herbel and Record staff members submitted even after the raid had been disavowed.

Soyez kept evidence seized in the raids in his office. According to KBI and CBI reports cited in the motion, Soyez told his deputies even after public backlash that he wanted to keep the wrongfully seized evidence, including a copy of files obtained from the Record’s file server.

The Herbels’ motion cites what it terms consciousness of guilt on Soyez’s part — KBI and CBI evidence that Soyez warned his deputies not to put “their name on the damned thing.”

The motion specifically cites how then-investigator Steve Janzen relayed to CBI agents his suspicions about Soyez not personally participating in the raids and how investigator Aaron Christner had been willing to talk to CBI investigators only because he thought he might receive protection as a whistleblower.

In CBI documents, Christner recounts how he expressed concerns about the legality of the raids but “someone higher ranking” dismissed them.

Christner was the one tasked with conducting required preliminary searches of electronic items before they were seized, but his keyword searches were so ill-advised (searching Record computers, for example, for the word “Kansas”) that no meaningful results could be found, prompting Cody and Soyez to seem to agree to simply seize the computers.

According to the motion by the Herbels’ attorneys, KBI agent Bethanie Popejoy, whose agency had warned Cody and Soyez not to conduct the searches themselves, stated afterward: “I think we can all agree that a giant media case is not the time to try out new skills in computer forensic examination.”

Then-mayor David Mayfield

According to KBI and CBI evidence cited in the motion by the Herbels’ attorneys, the first thing Cody did after learning that Newell’s driving record had been obtained by the Record and Herbel was to go to the city building and discuss the case with city officials not normally involved in law enforcement.

The next day, Cody met with Mayfield and Soyez. Mayfield initially told them he did not want updates but later said he wanted Cody to let him “know how it goes.”

Two days before the raid, according to KBI and CBI reports cited, Mayfield, a sheriff’s department employee, met with Newell and told her police needed to arrest Herbel to get Herbel off the city council.

Even after the raids, Mayfield continued to focus his ire on Herbel, claiming that she had made “another confession” in interviews with reporters.

“I hope and pray that Ruth doesn’t get re-elected,” the investigative reports quote him as saying, “or the city will have to deal with situations we deal with.

“She caused everything that is currently happening to our community by trying to keep Kari Newell from getting her liquor license because she wouldn’t let the newspaper in her business.”

Maag sent Newell’s driving information to Herbel and the Record after reading an account of how Newell had asked Cody to eject two Record staff members from a public meet-and-greet at her coffee shop for U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner even though LaTurner’s office had specifically invited them.

Officer Zach Hudlin

Zach Hudlin, who took over as interim chief after Cody eventually was suspended, resigned, and later charged, “by his own admission to the CBI” played a primary role in investigating the case and drafting search warrant applications.

Hudlin is quoted as saying in his CBI interview that Cody “didn’t a hundred percent know Kansas law, so he was relying on me to figure out what crimes were involved.”

Hudlin told CBI investigators that he and Cody conferred repeatedly. However, Hudlin also said he destroyed all messages and documents from those conversations.

He admitted to CBI that, on the first day of his investigation, he learned that “the public was able to access” freely and without limitation the information about Newell’s driving record.

He also admitted that he learned the first day of his investigation that the information had come from Maag and had not been given to Herbel by the Record.

None of this was mentioned in search warrant applications, which by his own admission Hudlin was assigned to review for accuracy.

In his interview with CBI agents, Hudlin initially said he didn’t realize the warrants focused on use of an illegal means of obtaining the driving information.

“That’s not the site I was dealing with at all,” CBI agents quote him as saying. “They’re two separate animals.”

Asked about a screenshot of the illegal method being included in the warrant application, Hudlin was quoted as saying: “I don’t remember ever sending him that screenshot.”

However, CBI agents produced documentary evidence that Hudlin had been the one who sent the screenshot to Cody.

Hudlin’s CBI interview also revealed that he, according to the motion filed by the Herbels’ attorneys, “misrepresented” the sole investigative effort undertaken — a phone call to Kansas Department of Revenue, which operates both the public and private methods for obtaining the record.

After CBI agents played a recording of that call to Hudlin, he admitted that KDOR “didn’t directly say it’s not a public thing” and that he made some “assumptions” and “leaps of understanding” in reporting what KDOR had told him.

He told CBI agents that, even before the search warrants were drafted, he was aware that no one needed to lie or steal someone’s identity to legally access Newell’s driving record and that saying so in the warrant applications he reviewed was a “materially false fact.”

He admitted that the website mentioned in the warrant application was “completely different” from the one he “talked to KDOR about,” yet he also told CBI agents it was his job to “make sure that it’s accurate.”

According to the KBI and CBI reports cited, Hudlin told Newell in advance of the raid not to tell other police officers about the investigation.

“I tried to limit my involvement as much as possible,” he is quoted as telling CBI, “because I didn’t want to be the one holding the bag at the end if it did blow up….

“I was OK with asking the initial question, but at a certain point, I don’t, again, I don’t want my name on this.”

He did, however, sign the warrants as the officer supervising the search when the warrants were returned to district court.

The Herbels’ motion also points out that essentially all records kept by the Marion police department about the case came from him.

Detective Aaron Christner

Aaron Christner, the sheriff’s detective who worked with Cody and Hudlin to draft search warrant applications but declined to sign them, knew “for years” about the free, public website the Record had used to verify what Maag had provided about Newell’s driving record, according to CBI reports cited by the Herbels’ attorneys.

He personally checked out the site and verified that the information was available there “knowing that a user could do so without making the false statements claimed in the warrant applications,” the attorneys wrote, citing a CBI interview.

Instead, Christner took a screenshot of a different website that could not be accessed legally and included it in the warrant application, the attorneys state, again citing CBI evidence.

Christner also recommended that KBI’s advice to wait be rejected and, despite his initial denials of involvement, sat in Cody’s office as the two took turns typing the search warrant applications “just writing it to try to show probable cause.”

He did this, the lawyers state, quoting his interview with CBI, knowing that “the information [he] was getting from Cody just didn’t . . . make sense.”

Other allegations

Despite protestations from Cody and Soyez that KBI supported the raid, the motion from the Herbels’ lawyers cites KBI agent Popejoy’s initial reaction to the search as “shocked, angry, disappointed, disbelief.”

It also cites conclusions from special prosecutors now pursuing charges against Cody that the warrant application’s attempts to show official misconduct by Herbel were “utterly misplaced.”

It also notes that other Kansas prosecutors reached out to County Attorney Joel Ensey after the raid to warn him that the warrants were so bad that Ensey personally could be held liable.

Ensey, who later declined to seek re-election, then concluded the warrants “weren’t good” and asked that they be voided.

The Herbels’ attorneys argue that new evidence from KBI and CBI indicate that Cody, Soyez, Mayfield, Christner, and Hudlin “worked together to manufacture probable cause for a politically motivated persecution of the mayor’s rival.”

“The only reason defendants did not complete their plan to arrest Ruth,” the attorneys say in their motion, “was because the attorney general’s office intervened after the national media outrage.

“Defendants worked together to find a crime they could stretch to fit Ruth’s conduct, and when they couldn’t stretch it far enough, they misled the magistrate instead.”

Their motion seeks to reinstate previously dismissed allegations of civil rights violations.

At the same time, the attorneys served notice that they would be seeking to drop allegations against Janzen, who resigned from the sheriff’s department as a result of the raid.