A small town in Kansas has become a battleground over the First Amendment, after the local police force and county sheriff’s deputies raided the office of The Marion County Record.

Raids of news organizations are exceedingly rare in the United States, with its long history of legal protections for journalists. At The Record, a family-owned paper with a circulation of about 4,000, the police seized computers, servers and cellphones of reporters and editors. They also searched the home of the publication’s owner and semiretired editor as well as the home of a city councilwoman.

The searches, conducted on Friday, appeared to be linked to an investigation into how a document containing information about a local restaurateur found its way to the local newspaper — and whether the restaurant owner’s privacy was violated in the process. The editor of the newspaper said the raids may have had more to do with tensions between the paper and officials in Marion, a town of about 2,000 north of Wichita, over prior coverage.

The raid is one of several recent cases of local authorities taking aggressive actions against news organizations — some of which are part of a dwindling cohort left in their area to hold governments to account. And it fits a pattern of pressure being applied to local newsrooms. One recent example is the 2019 police raid of the home of Bryan Carmody, a freelance journalist in San Francisco, who was reporting on the death of Jeff Adachi, a longtime public defender.

“There’s a lot of healthy tension between the government and newspapers, but this?” Emily Bradbury, the executive director of the Kansas Press Association, said in an interview about the raid in Marion. She warned that the raid was a dangerous attack on press freedom in the country.

“This is not right, this is wrong, this cannot be allowed to stand,” she said.

The newspaper’s owner and editor, Eric Meyer, said in an interview that the newspaper had done nothing wrong. The newspaper did not publish an article about the government record, though Mr. Meyers said that it had received a copy from a confidential source and that one of its reporters had verified its authenticity using the state’s records available online.

In an email, Marion’s chief of police, Gideon Cody, defended the raid, which was earlier reported online by The Marion County Record and by Kansas Reflector, a nonprofit news organization.

“I believe when the rest of the story is available to the public, the judicial system that is being questioned will be vindicated,” Mr. Cody said. He declined to discuss the investigation in detail.

On Sunday, more than 30 news organizations and press freedom advocates, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, signed a letter from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to Mr. Cody condemning the raid.

The Marion County Record is uncommonly aggressive for its size. Mr. Meyer said that the newspaper, which has seven employees, has stoked the ire of some local leaders for its vigorous reporting on Marion County officials, including asking questions about Mr. Cody’s employment history.

The paper is overseen by Mr. Meyer, who is 69 and has had a long career in journalism, working as a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal and a professor at the University of Illinois. He also has a family connection to The Marion County Record: His father, Bill, worked there for half a century beginning in 1948, rising to be its top editor.

In 1998, his family bought the newspaper and two others nearby — the Hillsboro Star-Journal and Peabody Gazette-Bulletin — from the previous publisher, the Hoch family, who had owned them for 124 years.

The dispute over the government record that led to the raid might not have become an issue if not for a tip that came after a meet-and-greet held on Aug. 2 for the local congressman, Jake LaTurner, at Kari’s Kitchen, an establishment owned by Kari Newell, a local restaurateur.

Ms. Newell asked the police chief to remove Mr. Meyer and a reporter, Phyllis Zorn, from the event, saying that she did not want them to attend.

After the newspaper published an article about the episode, Ms. Zorn received a private message on Facebook, Mr. Meyer said, from someone who shared a letter to Ms. Newell from the Kansas Department of Revenue. The letter detailed the steps she needed to take to restore her driver’s license, which had been suspended after a drunken driving citation in 2008, according to the newspaper.

Last Monday, Ms. Newell appeared at a City Council meeting seeking approval to operate a liquor-serving establishment. She accused the newspaper at the meeting of illegally obtaining the letter and giving it to a councilwoman, Ruth Herbel. Ms. Herbel, whose home was also searched on Friday, did not respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Meyer said that the newspaper had not shared the document with Ms. Herbel. He added that Ms. Newell had later told the newspaper that the release of the information might have been related to her ongoing divorce proceedings.

A search warrant for the raid, issued by a judge roughly an hour before the search on Friday morning, mentions Ms. Newell and cited potential violations of laws involving identity theft and the illegal use of a computer. The latter, among other things, forbids using a computer “with the intent to defraud or to obtain money, property, services or any other thing of value by means of false or fraudulent pretense or representation.”

A spokesperson for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, which aids criminal justice agencies statewide, said on Saturday that the Marion police approached the bureau to help with an investigation into “illegal access and dissemination of confidential criminal justice information.” In a statement on Sunday, the bureau noted the importance of a free press, but added, “No one is above the law, whether a public official or a representative of the media.”

Although news organizations are sometimes the targets of legal actions by government officials, including subpoenas seeking interview notes and other records, the search and seizure of the tools to produce journalism are rare.

Seth Stern, advocacy director at Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of journalists and whistle-blowers, said federal law allowed the police to search journalists when the authorities have probable cause to believe the journalists had committed a crime unrelated to their journalism. That exception does not apply, however, in a case where the alleged crime is gathering the news, he said. When journalists are suspected of committing crimes as part of news gathering, the government’s option is to serve a subpoena, which can be challenged in court before it is enforced.

“You can’t say, ‘I’m allowed to raid the newsroom because I’m investigating a crime,’ if the crime you’re investigating is journalism,” he added.

The police chief, Mr. Cody, who started in the job this spring, and Ms. Newell argued that journalists are subject to search if they themselves are suspects in the offense being investigated. Ms. Newell said that someone had unlawfully used her identity to obtain private information about her online.

In a phone interview, Ms. Newell framed the dispute as a straightforward violation of her privacy by the newspaper rather than a First Amendment battle.

“There’s a huge difference between vindictive and vindication,” Ms. Newell said. “I firmly believe that this was a vindictive move, full of malice. And I hope in the end, I receive vindication.”

The newspaper, which publishes weekly on Wednesdays, is scrambling to put out the next edition without most of its computers and servers, which contained articles as well as ads and public notices.

Mr. Meyer said he had never experienced government pressure like this.

“If we don’t fight back and we don’t win in fighting back, it’s going to silence everybody,” he said.

He had returned full time to Marion during the Covid-19 pandemic and stayed on, retiring from his university post and spending more time writing and editing for the newspaper, and living with his 98-year-old mother. He said he does not receive a salary, though he receives an annual bonus if the company turns a profit at the end of the year.

On Saturday, his mother died. In an article published online on Saturday evening, the newspaper connected Joan Meyer’s death to the search, writing that it had made her “stressed beyond her limits.” The headline: “Illegal raids contribute to death of newspaper co-owner.”

Jack Begg contributed research.

It’s been said that a bad day at the fair is always better than a good day at work. For Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, those two ideas collided on Saturday in Iowa.

Mr. DeSantis, who has been struggling to gain ground on former President Donald J. Trump and is counting on making his mark in the state’s first nominating contest, suffered a series of moments — all beyond his control — that would be enough for any candidate to question his place in the political universe, especially before a near face-to-face encounter with the front-runner at the Iowa State Fair.

Ahead of the Florida governor’s appearance with Gov. Kim Reynolds of Iowa at a “fair-side chat,” a plane flew overhead with a banner that read “Be likable, Ron!” Although it wasn’t immediately clear who was responsible for the stunt, the joke was a reference to advice given to Mr. DeSantis before a 2018 debate during his first run for Florida governor.

Then, during the interview, a small group of liberal protesters with cowbells and whistles sought to interrupt the conversation with Ms. Reynolds, who reminded the crowd to be “Iowa Nice.” Several of the protesters were removed from the event by the Iowa State Patrol. For other candidates, Ms. Reynolds’s interviews have been a safe space with softball questions and few unpredictable moments. Not so for Mr. DeSantis.

But drawing scorn from the left has always been part of the Florida governor’s brand. And Mr. DeSantis’s appearances on Saturday with two of Iowa’s top Republicans — in addition to the interview with Ms. Reynolds, the governor and his family rode the Ferris wheel with Senator Joni Ernst — reflected the attention his campaign is showering on Iowa, where he has pledged to visit all 99 counties.

Mr. DeSantis leaned into his Iowa-centric approach, criticizing Mr. Trump for his attacks on Ms. Reynolds, which the governor called “totally out of bounds” as he spoke briefly with reporters. “She’s never done anything to him,” Mr. DeSantis said of Ms. Reynolds, who is staying neutral in the caucuses. “But that’s just how he operates, to attack one of the best governors in the country.”

Accompanied by his wife, Casey, and three small children, Mr. DeSantis walked through crowds of fairgoers to join Ms. Ernst and Representative Zach Nunn, also a Republican, for a session at the grill flipping burgers and pork chops. Donning a red Iowa Pork Producers Association apron, Mr. DeSantis dove into the retail politics demanded at the busy state fair.

But Mr. Trump, who also visited the fair on Saturday, proved impossible to escape, although the paths of the two candidates never directly intersected.

Mr. DeSantis was trailed for much of the day by Trump supporters with placards trumpeting Mr. Trump as a “back-to-back Iowa champ” in 2016 and 2020. Mr. Trump of course did not win the 2016 Iowa caucuses, placing second to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. He never conceded defeat.

And while the Trump Team handed out anti-DeSantis fliers before the former president’s speech at the Steer N’ Stein, the trolling was not limited to the fairgrounds, it seems. As Mr. DeSantis finished flipping pork chops, Mr. Trump’s plane appeared overhead, circling the fairgrounds in what Iowa locals say is a nonstandard flight path into Des Moines International Airport, and prompting chants of “We love Trump” from supporters in the crowd.

Mr. DeSantis’s tour through the state fair also exposed him to the kind of unscripted interactions his campaign usually avoids. Some people shouted positive encouragement as he and his family walked by (“We love you, Governor!” “Go get ’em, Ron!”), to which Mr. DeSantis often responded with a smile or a wave.

Others — on both the left and the right — jeered him with cries of “Loser!” “Fascist!” or “DeSanctimonious” (a favored insult of Mr. Trump’s), which Mr. DeSantis ignored. One woman hurled an expletive at him as he carried his young daughter on his shoulders.

All the while, Mr. DeSantis’s family, his wife, Casey, and the children (Madison, 6, Mason, 5, and Mamie, 3), reaped a prize bounty at the fair games, including a milk jug toss and balloon popping. They walked away with at least two oversize Pikachu stuffed animals and what appeared to be a giant koala.

Anjali Huynh contributed reporting.