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All Muck is Local: Who's Laughing Now?
The last time we checked in with Kwame "Busted Is What You See!" Kilpatrick, he was denying all charges, saying he'd been punished by God, and continuing to serve as Mayor of Detroit. This week brought more of the same.
On Tuesday, the full slew of the hundreds of text messages exchanged between Kilpatrick and former Chief of Staff Beatty were released. And Kilpatrick? To quote another American fabulist, Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
The messages, written over four months in 2002 and 2003, were originally intended to be released at the time of Kilpatrick and Beatty's trial for retaliating against city police whistleblowers in August 2007. But as we've noted before, Kilpatrick's lawyers fought hard to keep them under wraps -- all in vain, because The Detroit Free Press got their hands on them. These new messages were also released to the Press as a result of the paper's lawsuit against the City of Detroit for more information on the mayor's secret $8.4 million settlement with the whistleblowers, a key part of which was to keep the text messages private.
The text messages run the gamut of evidence from indications that Beatty and Kilpatrick had been conspiring to orchestrate the removal of the whistleblowing police officers to lots and lots of sex talk... with a lot of LOL thrown in for good measure (the Kilpatricks still maintain a house on Leslie Street, in addition to the mayor's mansion):
But he has sobered up a bit since then. Late Tuesday, during a budget plan meeting with city residents he said:
"It's unfortunate that in Detroit only, you're guilty till proven innocent," he told the group of about 100. "There's a lot of bad information being presented in front of you, and hopefully by the end of this, we'll all see things pretty clearly."Afterward, he told reporters: "I don't think that, at all, this is a smoking gun that everybody thought it would be."
And with that, everyone continues to await Kilpatrick's magical exoneration.
However, Detroit's hopes for a new mayor remain cloudy. One of the problems may be that the judge presiding over Kilpatrick's upcoming criminal trial, Ronald Giles, is a family friend and contributor to Kilpatrick's mayoral campaign. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy requested that he be removed from the case, but District Chief Judge Marylin Atkins refused to remove Giles, or any other judge.
In a nine-page decision, Atkins concluded there was no basis to remove Giles or any other judges.Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy called Atkins' decisions "particularly disturbing" and "sadly incomplete."
Josh
Zachary
I haven't been following this case and I certainly don't know who's guilty of anything but what, exactly, are these text messages supposed to reveal? It looks like inane babble. (I'm not a text message user myself so maybe I'm missing something obvious.)
Are these messages supposed to implicate or exonerate Kilpatrick or anyone else? I don't get it. What's the story here?
May 5, 2008 12:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
let's see...there were drunken parties going on for years at the mayoral mansion. One night, a stripper was called there, somehow or another an argument ensued, I think with the mayor's wife, or maybe over payment, or was it both... The stripper wound up dead, with a bullet in her that was determined to be of the same caliber and from the same type of handgun issued to Detroit Police officers.
Detroit P.D. Internal Affairs was investigating, and were told to stop by the Mayor's people, when those cops kept investigating, two got fired and one got re-assigned to a do-nothing desk job and told to keep his mouth shut. That's where the lawsuit with the "whistle blowers" comes in.
The text messages are integral to the case. Prosecutors say they show the Mayor and his assistant, among others, conspired to cover up the mysterious death of this woman from the very night of the incident. The sexual involvement/illicit affair the married Mayor and his number 1 assistant are only secondary. Juicy...but secondary.
May 5, 2008 11:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not talking about the big story. I'm talking about these text messages.
You got all that from the dozens lines above? I read this article as "Wow! Check out these messages. Kilpatrick is toast now!" But I see insipid babble in those messages and half of it is LOLs. I'm missing something for sure. But thanks for painting the big picture.
May 6, 2008 12:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, you are missing something. I am getting my information from more than just this blog entry: The Detroit News/Free Press, the local TV News affiliates, etc. The text message excerpt shown in this blog entry is inane, innocuous, so you are correct in your assertion that we can't tell anything from what we see here. There are much more explicit text conversations that we are "not allowed" to see. This article doesn't even scratch the surface, and doesn't succeed in it's "Wow! Kwame's toast now!" attempt.
Personally, I couldn't care less if the Mayor is getting a little nookie on the side. That's his business. Hell, a former President made that cool and fashionable years ago. But what I DO mind is his use of his office to obstruct justice by firing investigators of that murder. What I DO mind is that he is trying to use the affair as a public smokescreen to cover up his possible involvement in a murder.
May 6, 2008 10:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
OK. Agree with everything you say. I was looking for more in this article than there is I guess.
May 6, 2008 5:10 PM | Reply | Permalink