DETROIT – For most of his time in office, President Donald Trump had strong, unswerving support from Michigan Republicans. But just hours before leaving office, he did something that stunned, perplexed and angered many of them:
He let Kwame Kilpatrick, Detroit’s corrupt former mayor, out of prison, commuting his federal sentence to the seven years he served.
Matthew Schneider, the federal district attorney who Trump had appointed to go after criminals in the eastern half of Michigan, was not happy. He told the White House he strongly opposed any pardon or commutation of Kilpatrick’s sentence.
“Kwame Kilpatrick has earned every day he served in federal prison for the horrible crimes he has committed against the people of Detroit,” he said. “He is a notorious and unrepentant criminal,” he said, just before he resigned to join a local law firm.
Normally, that would have been enough to prevent any President from commuting a felon’s sentence.
In most such cases in recent history, pardons and commutations only come after the President gets a strong recommendation to do so from the Federal Bureau of Prisons. That didn’t happen here, either. So why did President Trump do it?
According to the White House, he commuted the sentence because “during his incarceration, Kilpatrick has taught public speaking classes and led Bible Study groups with his fellow inmates.”
What wasn’t mentioned was the fawning letter Kilpatrick, who was supposed to be imprisoned until Aug. 1, 2037, wrote Trump, saying “for the first time, we have a President that can see and understand how our own government will sometimes plot, organize and coordinate to work against its own people.”
From his prison cell, the former lifelong liberal Democrat took a swipe at President Obama, the “fake news” media and flattered Trump, saying “Please don’t stop fighting. You are RIGHT!”
Kilpatrick reportedly also offered to campaign for Trump if he had been released before the election.
That might have backfired. Kwame Kilpatrick led probably the most corrupt administration in Detroit history. While news accounts focused on the highly sexual text messages exchanged between Kilpatrick and Christine Beatty, his chief of staff, and their attempts to fire a suspicious police official that was just the beginning.
Millions were misappropriated from city pension funds. A civic fund was used to send the Kilpatrick family to a five-star California resort. The list went on and on. All this was going on as Detroit, long one of the poorest cities in the nation, was spiraling downhill.
Five years after the man who once called himself Detroit’s “hip-hop” mayor resigned, the city, which had become insolvent, was taken over by the state, which appointed an emergency manager to straighten out the mess. Kwame Kilpatrick was then a defendant in federal court. Four months before the city declared bankruptcy, the verdict came in. Kilpatrick, who had already served time in state prison and the county jail, was convicted of 24 separate felonies in federal court on March 11, 2013. His crimes included racketeering, tax evasion, extortion and mail fraud. He put more than 20 relatives on the city payroll, including his father, who also went to prison.
He was sentenced to 28 years in prison. His supporters argued that was excessive. Some said that his sentence would not have been so harsh if he was white – but that wasn’t true. Prosecutors modeled it on the sentence given to Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimona, who committed similar, if less flamboyant offenses, and received an identical, 28-year sentence the year before.
When news of Kwame Kilpatrick’s freeing came, the streets were buzzing with rumors. Would he come back to Detroit and run for mayor again? The city’s election is this year.
Current Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, a Democrat who is running for a third term this year, startled some when he immediately said he was happy Kilpatrick’s sentence was commuted.
“This is a decision President Trump got right,” he said. Then it sunk in. Kwame Kilpatrick cannot run for mayor, or any state or local office, because, while his sentence was commuted, he wasn’t pardoned. Under Michigan law, no felon can run until 20 years after his or her conviction, which in Kilpatrick’s case would be 2033.
What Kwame Kilpatrick, now 50, will do is uncertain. He is living with his mother in Texas, and avoiding the media. He has lost weight and came out of prison with a long, gray beard.
His long-suffering wife Carlita divorced him while he was in prison. He hasn’t seen his three sons in years. He has no assets and no job and owes $200,000 to the IRS, $800,000 to the city of Detroit and a whopping $1.5 million or more to the city’s water and sewage department. “Kwame Kilpatrick is a person of great talent who still has much to contribute,” Mayor Duggan said.
Perhaps. But that’s what everyone said in 2001, when at age 31, he became Detroit’s youngest mayor in history.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said “there are no second acts in American lives.” Kwame Kilpatrick badly needs a third one.
Note: Donald Trump freed Kilpatrick – but he also may have done him a disservice. The order commuting his sentence said the former mayor owes $4.5 million to the city water department, an amount that was later reduced to $1.5 million.
Harold Gurewitz, Kilpatrick’s attorney, was baffled and said he was hoping the paperwork would be corrected.
