Detroit Mayor Sues To Block His Removal

In a desperate effort to halt his inevitable removal from office, an embattled big-city mayor charged with multiple felonies has asked a judge to stop an upcoming hearing with the governor that will likely lead to his ouster.

Charged with more than a dozen serious crimes, Detroit’s disgraced mayor (Kwame Kilpatrick) has ignored calls from his colleagues on the City Council to resign and now he’s trying to stop the governor from finally getting rid of him. Kilpatrick’s entire tenure has been plagued by scandal but in the last year the self-described “Hip-Hop Mayor” has been in rare form.

First he got slapped with a shameful 12-count indictment that includes perjury, obstruction of justice and misconduct in office for lying under oath to cover an extramarital affair with a city staffer during a police whistleblower trial that cost taxpayers millions to settle.

Then he got charged with two additional felonies for assaulting a sheriff’s detective trying to serve a subpoena on one of his shady friends. The irate mayor pushed the detective and attacked him and his partner with profanity and racial remarks.

Kilpatrick topped that highly publicized thug-fest by becoming the first mayor in Detroit’s 300-plus years to spend the night in a jail cell for violating the bond conditions in his perjury case. He followed that act by violating the terms of the separate assault bond when he spent time with a witness to the crime.

After first ignoring endless calls to rid Michigan’s largest city of this malignant tumor of a leader, Democrat Governor Jennifer Granholm finally agreed to hold a hearing to address the matter next week. Kilpatrick says the governor is biased and therefore he cannot get a fair hearing from her.

In a lawsuit attmpting to block the hearing, Kilpatrick says the governor has not presumed his innocence and that her staff even prepared a “blackboard scenario in which his presumption of innocence was ignored and significantly undercut.” The complaint adds that the governor wants him to resign, no matter what the evidence, because he was making Michigan look bad.

The truth often hurts. Kilpatrick has been embroiled in controversy since he became mayor in 2002. He spent the a great deal of his first term partying with strippers at the mayor’s mansion and got busted for charging hundreds of thousands of dollars on his city-issued credit card for personal travel, meals and entertainment. He also used $25,000 of city funds to get his wife a fancy sports utility vehicle at a time when Detroit was in a deep financial crisis and thousands of city jobs were being cut.