Mike Cox Sues Jocelyn Benson Over SPLC Cover-up

In April 2026, Mike Cox filed a FOIA request seek­ing emails and oth­er records involv­ing Ben­son, her depart­ment, and the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter (SPLC). Sec­re­tary Ben­son then demand­ed $10,309.94 to process the request, includ­ing more than $5,000 up front, and claimed the depart­ment need­ed up to 10 weeks to com­plete a sim­ple elec­tron­ic records search. The Cox cam­paign paid the deposit demand­ed by Ben­son, but the depart­ment still has not pro­duced the records more than 11 weeks after the orig­i­nal FOIA request was filed.

The SPLC was fed­er­al­ly indict­ed this spring on fraud, mon­ey laun­der­ing, and pay­ments to extrem­ists tied to the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the Amer­i­can Nazi Par­ty. The Depart­ment of Jus­tice has stat­ed the SPLC fun­neled more than $4 mil­lion to hate groups while mis­lead­ing donors and finan­cial insti­tu­tions. Ben­son served on the SPLC board dur­ing a peri­od cov­ered by the indict­ment.

Now, Mike Cox has filed a law­suit against Sec­re­tary of State Joce­lyn Ben­son and her depart­ment to force the release of pub­lic records about Benson’s involve­ment with the fed­er­al­ly-indict­ed SPLC. “It’s clear that Joce­lyn Ben­son has some­thing to hide on the SPLC, or she would have proud­ly released these com­mu­ni­ca­tions months ago,” said Cox. “Sec­re­tary Ben­son is stalling. Why? Prob­a­bly because it is very dam­ag­ing to her elec­tion. So I’m tak­ing her to court to find out.

“There’s only two options: either Joce­lyn Ben­son knew about the SPLC’s fund­ing of hate groups like Nazis and the KKK or she was com­plete­ly asleep at the wheel of this orga­ni­za­tion she bragged about over­see­ing. Nei­ther answer is accept­able for some­one run­ning to be Gov­er­nor of Michi­gan.”