Ahem. One might call this “overkill” in both the figurative and literal sense, given how the shock of the raid killed its 98-year-old co-owner, Joan Meyer. Late yesterday, the Washington Post revealed why Marion Police conducted a massive series of raids and seizures against the Marion Record and its reporters, and it’s every bit as petty and dumb as it has appeared all along.

And every bit as shockingly authoritarian, too:

The police chief who led a widely criticized raid of a newspaper office in Kansas told a judge that a reporter there accessed a restaurant owner’s driving record from a state database and could not have done so without “either impersonating the victim or lying about the reasons why the record was being sought,” according to confidential court records used to obtain a search warrant for the premises.

In sworn affidavits that have not previously been reported, Marion Police Chief Gideon Cody also wrote that the Kansas Department of Revenue had confirmed to him that Marion County Record reporter Phyllis Zorn had downloaded the private record. The documents provide the first public accounting of the evidence that was cited to justify the raid.

Zorn confirmed to The Washington Post that she downloaded the record, a process that involves entering a name, date of birth and driver’s license number. She said she did so to verify information she had received from a source.

In the first place, it doesn’t appear that Cody ever had any evidence that Zorn used a stolen identity to access those records, the argument for which Cody got a judge to approve the search warrant. (The county attorney confirms this, as we’ll get to in a moment.) Zorn could have just as easily simply lied about her status on the website, which might be a crime but hardly one that would necessitate a raid on the newspaper, the residence of its owner, and seizure of its digital and paper records. Why did the judge sign off on these warrants without any proffer of evidence of identity theft or computer hacking?

And even if Zorn was “impersonating the victim,” then only Zorn would have been a legitimate target of a search warrant — not the whole newspaper, including the residence of its 98-year-old co-owner, a search that apparently led to her subsequent demise. Eric Meyer, the son and partner of now-deceased co-owner Joan Meyer, puts it well. “Even if it was illegal for us to do that,” he told the Post, “the police response was like bringing the SWAT team out for jaywalking.”

Indeed, the response was so ridiculously overblown that it looks a lot more like a punitive action itself by the police chief than it does a legit attempt to investigate a potential violation of state driving records. And for that matter, would Marion Police have proper jurisdiction for that alleged crime anyway? Wouldn’t that be a matter better referred to state police and/or the Kansas Bureau of Investigation? The driving records belong to the state, not the city or county.

Well, the KBI is now involved anyway, as the Post reports. The county attorney quashed the warrants as insufficiently predicated, and one has to imagine the state Attorney General may not be far behind in poking around in Marion:

Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey, who is the county prosecutor, on Wednesday said that “insufficient evidence” had been used to connect the alleged crimes being investigated — the most serious of which is a felony — to the places that were searched. He asked police to return the property seized from the newspaper. The Kansas Bureau of Investigation has said it still is examining whether the newspaper violated state law.

This all started out with a marital dispute, a liquor license, and local-politics infighting. Restauranteur Kari Newell applied for a liquor license in Marion despite having a DUI conviction that normally would prohibit it, and that resulted in a suspended driver’s license. Her “estranged husband” Ryan decided to make a stink about it after a “source” (not Zorn) passed along a copy of Kari’s driving record to him that confirmed her conviction and suspension. A friend of Ryan’s passed the copy to both the city council and to Zorn, as a way to expose Kari and prevent the liquor license from being renewed. Zorn accessed the state records to confirm the information.

Now, that might have been illegal, as even Eric Meyer concedes, but Zorn wasn’t the original source of the record. Nor does it appear to be a case of “identity theft” except in Cody’s mind. Instead, this smells of local insider politics and a way to get even for stepping on the wrong toes. Included in the searches was a warrant for Ruth Herbel, the councilwoman who received the copy of Kari Newell’s driving record from Ryan’s friend Pam Maag, even though there’s no indication at all that Herbel or Maag (or Ryan Newell, for that matter) had anything to do with acquiring the record.

Why would police target a councilwoman and the owner of the newspaper over this issue? Why not interrogate Ryan Newell and find out the original source of the driving record? Did police even bother to conduct a search at Newell’s residence for that information? At least from the Post’s reporting, no:

The Record did publish a story on Aug. 9, under Meyer’s byline, that said Newell had lost her license because of a drunken-driving conviction. The story, headlined “Restaurateur accuses paper, councilwoman,” reported on the allegations Newell made at the meeting. It said the person who provided Newell’s record to the newspaper and Herbel had “bragged about retaining ‘connections’ despite no longer working in law enforcement.”

Two days after that story appeared, Cody signed affidavits saying he believed “certain contraband, fruits, instrumentalities, and evidence” of identity theft and computer crimes having been committed could be located in Meyer’s home, Herbel’s home and the Record newsroom.

The person who bragged was Maag, not Zorn, Meyer, or Herbel. And yet the police didn’t seem terribly interested in Maag or Ryan Newell. That sounds like Cody may have had an axe to grind against the local newspaper. That may be something for the KBI to investigate, and it will almost certainly come to a Marion County jury soon in a lawsuit — wrongful death, abuse of authority, and anything else Meyer’s attorneys can fit into a legal document.

Even apart from the consequences, this serves as a clear warning about the increasingly authoritarian impulses that are being indulged in such matters. We saw similar overkill when the FBI sent an armed platoon of agents to raid and arrest Mark Houck over a sidewalk argument in front of an abortion clinic, in service to the Department of Justice’s apparent policy to punish pro-life demonstrators. The Marion raids are almost equally absurd and disproportionate to the issue at hand. This is looking like a trend, and one that needs to be nipped in the bud at federal and local levels.