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.”