Marion police never interviewed tipster who sent state document to newspaper, official

The tip that led to a series of events culminating in the raid of a Kansas newspaper was first sent to the Marion County Record through a Facebook message. That message contained a document with the name, date of birth and driver’s license number for a local restaurateur.

The source of the information was Pam Maag, a former emergency dispatcher and the wife of a retired state trooper, who spoke with The Star on Monday. Court records show she initially reached out to the Record and to a local councilwoman with concerns about local business owner Kari Newell’s driving records. Maag, 53, confirmed this to The Star.

What followed was a raid on the Record’s office, the home of its publisher and the home of Councilwoman Ruth Herbel as police asserted they were searching for proof of identity theft and unlawful acts concerning computers.

No law enforcement reached out to Maag before the raid, and none have contacted her since, she said, adding that if her name is on the affidavits, which it is, someone should have contacted her.

“This is just one incident of some of the stuff that goes on in a small town and what people don’t know,” she said. “It’s sad that this had to get to this point. I still question how much of it really had to do with the drivers’ license piece of paper that I sent to the newspaper.”

The raid quickly drew widespread criticism and outrage, sparking a discussion about the freedom of the press that reached audiences nationally and even globally.

As more information is released on what led to the raid in a town of fewer than 2,000 people about 60 miles north of Wichita, the Record’s publisher Eric Meyer said there are still other people he believes should be investigated, like Maag.

Unlike Maag, Meyer said, the paper did not obtain the document “with the intent of damaging somebody’s reputation.”

Maag said her decision to leak the document had nothing to do with Newell’s reputation. Instead, she contended, it had to do with law enforcement not doing their job.

But Maag is also surprised no authorities have tried to learn more from her. Had Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody, who applied for the search warrant, first called her, the raid might never have happened, she speculated.

“It goes back again to lack of police work,” she said.

Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey has since withdrawn the search warrant used to justify the raid, citing insufficient evidence linking the seized items to alleged crimes. Law enforcement has since returned the computers, phones and other devices taken during the search.

The Kansas Bureau of Investigation is now leading the investigation. The KBI said it plans to then turn its findings over to Ensey, who will then decide whether to file charges. Ensey is the brother of Jeremy Ensey, who along with his wife Tammy Ensey owns Marion’s Historic Elgin Hotel, which houses the restaurant Chef’s Plate at Parlour 1886, which is owned by Newell.

As other media outlets, including The Star, have rushed to report on what some are calling a gross injustice directed at journalists, investigations have highlighted the DUI arrest history of the judge who signed the search warrant and the checkered past in Kansas City law enforcement of the police chief who executed it.

Journalists from the Record have said they were also investigating Cody’s past in Kansas City at the time of the raid.

“This is just this spaghetti bowl of things and you don’t even know where it begins and where it ends,” Meyer said Friday.

The Star established the following timeline of events, including Maag’s involvement, based on the affidavit and interviews with Maag, Meyer and Kari Newell’s husband Ryan, whom she’s separated from.

Aug. 1

On Aug. 1, Newell, the owner of Chef’s Plate at Parlour 1886 restaurant and Kari’s Kitchen, a coffee shop and cafe that Newell opened in June across the street, hosted a meet-and-greet with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner and other officials at the latter. Three members of the Marion County Commission were also in attendance.

The three commissioners represented a majority of the five county commissioners, which meant the gathering was an open meeting under Kansas law.

Law enforcement, including Marion Police Chief Gideon, were invited and in attendance.

The police chief, who filed the affidavit, confirmed that he attended the gathering and removed Meyer and reporter Phyllis Zorn from the cafe at Newell’s request.

“I was standing in line waiting to get a drink at the coffee shop where we were and the police chief came up to us and said you’ve been asked to leave by the coffee shop owner,” Meyer told CNN. “She said we don’t want the media in here, so they threw us out.”

Newell told CNN that she had the journalists removed because the newspaper “has a long-standing reputation for twisting and contorting comments within our community.”

Aug. 2

Ryan and Kari Newell separated in September, he told The Star Monday. Their divorce proceedings are ongoing.

In early August, the 38-year-old Army veteran and Marion resident said he received a text from an anonymous number with a photo of a document showing that Kari Newell’s driver’s license was still suspended, despite some rumors otherwise, Ryan Newell said.

A few months earlier, a judge in their divorce proceedings had temporarily ordered that Kari Newell would get their vehicle and Ryan Newell would pay the insurance and vehicle payment.

“None of this was done out of malice,” he said, later adding: “If she got into a wreck and had a suspended driver’s license, I’m the one that would be on the hook for it. My insurance company wouldn’t cover anything, period.”

Concerned with this finding, Ryan Newell said he shared the document with his best friends, Pam and Roger Maag. He, too, said he’s never been contacted by law enforcement about the investigation.

Pam Maag said she did not search the Department of Revenue website for the record herself, nor did she ask anyone in law enforcement to run the search. She said she would never ask someone to risk their job over that.

Maag said it wasn’t news to her that Newell was driving on a suspended license. Until recently, the two had been longtime friends before the divorce proceedings began, Maag said.

With physical proof of the suspended license in her hands for the first time, Maag sent the screenshot over Facebook messenger to the councilwoman and a reporter.

“Our law enforcement was turning a blind eye to her driving suspended,” Maag said. “Not just 90 days, 120. We’re talking 15 years of this.”

Like any reporter would, Zorn scrutinized the tip she received on Aug. 2 over Facebook, which came through as a screenshot of a document, Meyer said.

The document from the Kansas Driver’s License Status Check website showed Newell could not have a driver’s license because of a 2008 drunk driving conviction.

Despite this, Maag told the reporter, Newell had been driving on a suspended license for 14 years. Newell confirmed this to the Washington Post last week. Meyer, in an interview with The Star, said a former sheriff’s deputy and a former Marion police officer told him they’d long known Newell was driving unlicensed.

But when the local paper received the tip, far less information was yet known.

“We had reason to believe that this may have been a forged document,” Meyer said. “We wanted to determine whether the document was forged or not.”

Meyer said he and Zorn also kept in mind that Maag had connections with law enforcement. When they asked Maag how she obtained the document, she directed them to the Department of Revenue search link that Zorn eventually used, Meyer said.

Zorn also reached out to the Department of Revenue to ask how to obtain the information and they also pointed her to the same link which was later used by Cody to justify the police raid, Meyer said.

“If it was something that was super secret, and we weren’t supposed to get, I don’t know why the Department of Revenue told us how to get it,” Meyer said.

Zach Denney, a spokesman for the Kansas Department of Revenue, said while he didn’t have a record of Zorn calling KDOR, that does not eliminate the possibility that she did call to ask how to check the status of a driver’s license.

“As long as the requestor has the required information, this information is public record and available online,” he said.

In short, the search Zorn proceeded to make was legal, according to the Department of Revenue.

Meyer said Zorn proceeded to pull up Newell’s driving record and confirmed the information leaked to them was accurate. The paper never distributed the record, he said.

“We weren’t intending to steal anything,” Meyer said. “We were trying to verify a document that they already knew where it came from, and that we had it.”

The paper’s attorney, Bernie Rhodes, who has also represented The Star, continues to insist that the reporter never broke the law, adding that all motor vehicle records are open records under Kansas law.

“As I have said numerous times in the last week, it is not a crime in America to be a reporter,” he said in a statement Saturday, when the affidavits were finally made public. “These affidavits prove that the only so-called ‘crime’ Chief Cody was investigating was being a reporter.”

Aug. 4

On Aug. 4, Cody said he received an email from Meyer who said he received a copy of someone’s private Department of Revenue records. Meyer told the police chief in that email that he had concerns about possible police misconduct in how the records were initially obtained.

The Star has not reviewed a copy of the email, but Meyer said he told the police chief and sheriff’s office that the paper did not intend to write anything after verifying the document. Instead, Meyer said he was concerned the document may have been obtained illegally through law enforcement sources.

Meyer said he ended the note by offering to cooperate with law enforcement if they believed an investigation into the original source of the document was justified.

Marion city administrator Brogan Jones was forwarded concerns about Newell from Councilwoman Herbel. Jones then emailed the concerns to Marion Mayor David Mayfield on Aug. 4, according to the affidavit.

“First I want to state that Chief/PO will not be looking into this,” Jones wrote. “Secondly the State is the oversight for this and will conduct all this type of research. We as a city need to stay out of this “hear say” or whatever else you want to call it,” he wrote, according to the affidavit.

Aug. 7

Cody said he read the email on Aug. 7, then contacted the Marion city administrator, Brogan Jones, to suggest an internal investigation be done. Jones said he was aware of the record because Herbel forwarded him a screenshot from Maag. Jones said Herbel sent the email because she wanted to reject Newell’s request for a liquor/caterer’s license which was on that day’s city council agenda.

The tip sent to Zorn didn’t mention that Newell was also applying for a liquor license, Meyer said. No one at the paper knew, since the upcoming city council agenda was still unpublished, Meyer said.

Meyer said they’ve done some investigating in the days since. As far as he could tell, Newell does not have a license for the restaurant housed inside the Historic Elgin Hotel. Instead, the license is held by building owner Tammy Ensey, who is also the sister-in-law of the county attorney.

The Star confirmed that the Historic Elgin Hotel, where Chef’s Plate at Parlour 1886 is located, has an on-premise drinking establishment liquor license that was issued on Aug. 28, 2021, in Ensey’s name. Ensey was the previous owner of the restaurant, which used to be called Parlour 1886.

In Kansas, liquor licenses are valid for two years at a time. According to the Chef’s Plate at Parlour 1886 website, the restaurant currently has a full-service bar. But the liquor license is set to expire on Aug. 28, according to state records.

“(Newell) operated for 14 years without a driver’s license. She may have been operating since February without a liquor or restaurant license,” Meyer said in explaining why the newspaper has continued reporting on the issue, which was brought back to the public’s attention at an Aug. 7 council meeting.

The Star was not able to independently confirm whether or not Newell’s license was still suspended as of Monday.

Newell took to a public podium during the meeting to accuse a Record journalist of “illegally” obtaining her personal information.

“What she did was negligent, reckless and unnecessary, and it was a violation of my personal privacy and information,” Newell said of Zorn, who she did not name at the council meeting.

Meyer in the same meeting countered that the paper had done nothing illegal, that the personal information Newell was referencing — a past DUI — had been shared with them on social media by an outside source.

Meyer said he and Newell got into a “very heated discussion” after the meeting. Newell told police that Meyer threatened her. He denies that, instead saying that he told her that if she continued insisting that the paper stole her information, then the information would eventually come out.

He said he also told Newell her statements were false and damaging to the paper.

“If you continue to do this, we will have to sue you and we will own your restaurant,” he recalled saying to her.

Aug. 9

Meyer attempted to set the record straight in an Aug. 9 newspaper article outlining how the paper obtained the information on Newell’s driving record, and how they went about verifying it.

In the story, headlined “Restaurateur accuses paper, councilwoman,” Meyer wrote that Maag had “bragged about retaining ‘connections’ despite no longer working in law enforcement,” though he did not name Maag as their source at the time.

Meyer wrote that after verifying the information was accurate, the Record decided not to publish a story. That changed after Newell spoke out at a recorded public meeting.

“Contrary to what (Newell) told the council, she indicated that she thought the information had been supplied to the source, whose identity she speculated about, by her estranged husband as part of an attempt in divorce proceedings to retain ownership of vehicles on grounds that she did not possess a license,” the article read.

Meyer later told The Star that Newell had speculated correctly that the paper’s source was Maag, though Meyer did not confirm it to Newell at the time.

Maag said that before Ryan Newell sent her the document, he had told her the judge in the divorce proceeding granted Kari Newell custody of their vehicle, even though she didn’t have a valid driver’s license.

Aug. 11

The affidavit directing the Aug. 11 search of the newsroom, Meyer’s home and Herbel’s home, filed by the police chief, said law enforcement were looking in part for “documents and records pertaining to Kari Newell.”

When law enforcement raided the newspaper office, a printout of the Facebook message tip from Maag was sitting on Meyer’s desk, he said. It was still there when Meyer returned to work.

Meyer’s mother and the paper’s co-owner, Joan Meyer, died the day after the raid on her newsroom and her home, at the age 98 after condemning the search as “Hitler tactics.”

Maag said she never would have imagined her tip to a reporter and a councilwoman would lead to such chaos.

“This was something that got way out of control, and you would have to ask Chief Cody how and why it got to the point it did, because it’s on him.”

Cody has not responded to multiple requests for comment from The Star over several days.

Ryan Newell, who’s lived in Marion since 2010, said it’s troubling to him how everything turned out.

“It’s unfortunate for Mr. Meyer and his family, to put his mother through that for no reason at all.” But he said he doesn’t feel one bit bad that it’s shined light on questions about Cody’s integrity. “It just kind of makes your mind all jumbled with everything that’s gone on in the past few weeks.”

“If seems like it’s the good ‘ole boys system that makes me not even proud to be from a small town anymore because the corruption from big towns has now spread into the little towns,” he said.

On Monday afternoon, the Marion City Council met for the first time since the search warrants were executed.

At the bottom of the agenda, in all capitalized letters and punctuated by 47 exclamation points, city officials said they will not be commenting on the ongoing investigation.