Is is legal for the disgraced former mayor of Detroit to use nearly $1 million in campaign funds to pay has legal fees?

Thanks to Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land (R), we will never know.

According to published reports, Land avoided making any decision regrading Kwame Kilpatrick’s use of $980,000 from his candidate  committee to pay his mouthpieces in his criminal cases:

“Michigan’s Secretary of State has refused to decide if former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrickwrongly used his re-election fund last year to pay nearly $980,000 in legal fees.
In a June 12 letter to Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett, the chief of staff for Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land, Brian DeBano, wrote that he could not give Garrett a decision on the legality of the move because she failed to provide a “complete statement of fact” when she asked.” Michigan won’t decide if Kilpatrick misused campaign cash, The Detroit News, June 16, 2009.

Land passed the buck to the IRS, stating that they needed to clarify if the legal fees were a legitimate business expense.

“Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick must provide documentation from the Internal Revenue Service to the Wayne County Clerk’s Office, proving that legal fees paid from campaign funds were an “ordinary and business” expense as determined by the federal tax code.

That is the suggestion Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land makes in a proposed response to a query from Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett about whether Kilpatrick broke the law when he spent nearly $1 million from his political campaign fund on personal lawyers.” DETROIT: Kilpatrick’s legal fees under scrutiny, The Detroit Free Press, June 13, 2009

Land, a presumptive candidate for the Republican nomination for governor, must be hoping that the Kilpatrick machine will turn the massive Detroit vote out for her in the GOP primary next year.