Foxnews reports:
Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick pleaded guilty to two counts of obstruction of justice and will step down as the mayor of the nation's 11th-largest city as part of a plea deal in a sex-and-misconduct scandal that has plagued the Motor City for months.
Kilpatrick's resignation was announced following his plea Thursday, but he'll stay on through Sept. 18 to help City Council President Ken Cockrel Jr. take the reins of the city. As part of the deal, Kilpatrick will spend four months in jail and pay the city $1 million over a five-year probation period.
The embattled mayor entered his plea Thursday in the courtroom of Wayne County Circuit Court Judge David Groner.
"I lied under oath," Kilpatrick said during the plea hearing.
The Wayne County prosecutor's office has charged Kilpatrick with eight felonies in the perjury case.
The announcement of a deal by the prosecutor's office sent reporters rushing from an extraordinary hearing Wednesday in which Gov. Jennifer Granholm is tasked with deciding if Kilpatrick should be removed from office for misconduct for his role in an $8.4 million whistle-blowers' settlement.
The governor's spokeswoman, Liz Boyd, said the removal hearing's second day would resume Thursday, an hour after Kilpatrick's appearance ends in Wayne County Circuit Court. A deal to resign would make Granholm's role moot.
The City Council has asked Granholm to use her constitutional authority to expel Kilpatrick for misconduct, saying it was misled when it approved the settlement last year with fired police officers.
Council members said they didn't know the deal carried secret provisions to keep a lid on steamy text messages between Kilpatrick and Christine Beatty, who was his chief of staff, on city-issued pagers.
Those messages, published by the Detroit Free Press in January, contradicted their denials of an extramarital affair when they testified at a trial last year involving the officers. That led Prosecutor Kym Worthy to charge the pair with perjury, conspiracy, misconduct and obstruction of justice.
The mayor would automatically be expelled from office if he is convicted of a felony. Kilpatrick also faces assault charges stemming from a confrontation in July.
Meanwhile, the Michigan attorney general's office, which is prosecuting the mayor on the assault charges, said it has no deal with Kilpatrick to close that case.
"We are ready to proceed to trial," spokesman Rusty Hills said. "These are serious offenses the mayor is charged with that involved officers in the performance of their duty."
News of a possible breakthrough between Kilpatrick and Worthy, after months of political and legal turmoil, overshadowed Granholm's historic hearing on the council's removal request.
Michigan governors are allowed by the state constitution to remove elected officials for misconduct, but the target never has been the leader of the state's largest city. The last time was in 1982, when Gov. William Milliken let a township official stay in office if he stopped drinking.
The mayor's legal team twice failed to persuade courts to stop the hearing Tuesday. Lawyers filed an appeal Wednesday with the Michigan Supreme Court, but there was no response from the justices.
Granholm, a fellow Democrat, has pared the case to two issues: Did Kilpatrick settle the lawsuits for personal gain because he feared release of the text messages? And did the mayor conceal information from the City Council?
A witness, Michael Stefani, an attorney for the three former police officers, said that he quickly settled lawsuits against the city after he told opposing attorneys that he planned to file text messages in court showing an affair between the mayor and Beatty.
Two officers had already won their whistle-blower trial the previous month, but the financial remedy ordered by a jury could have been appealed. Legal fees were unsettled, too.
Kilpatrick's lawyer, Sam McCargo, "looked shaken up" when he saw the messages and said he could call the mayor to pursue a "global resolution" with the officers, according to Stefani.
The assault charges against the mayor stem from a confrontation on his sister's porch. A sheriff's detective says Kilpatrick shoved him into another investigator as they were trying to serve a subpoena to the mayor's friend in the perjury case.
*Another Prime example of putting people in Power that belong in the Congo, and not in a metropolitan city!
Topic: Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick Resigns in Plea Deal! (Read 433 times)