Saturday rewind: Déjà vu in Detroit
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson helped fend off Trump's attempted 2020 election subversion. She's at it again.
For her efforts opposing Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Detroit, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson became one of the public officials bearing the brunt of his supporters’ wrath.
“People showed up on my front lawn in Detroit where I live with guns to try to interfere with those results, and to pressure me not to certify or to otherwise not allow the election to go forward,” Benson told All Rise News in a video interview, recounting an infamous incident from December 2020.
Benson’s then-4-year-old son had been inside the house when the armed mob showed up outside to protest.
“These growing voices outside my home were shouting things like ‘You’re a murderer’ and ‘Arrest her’ and ‘Come out and face us’ for the better part of an hour,” Benson recalled. “All that stood between my family and this growing potentially violent assembly of people or mob, for lack of a better word, was one neighborhood security guard on our front porch, and there are videos of this that were then live streamed on social media. I mean, it was terrifying.”
Some six years later, Benson is still fending off Trump’s attempts to discredit elections as Secretary of State, receiving a letter from his Justice Department demanding sensitive voter data in a purported effort to review the 2024 election results in Wayne County.
“It’s been six years of this,” Benson said. “They’ve found no data that shows anything about our elections is awry. Our elections in Michigan and nationwide are safe and secure and accurate. And yet they keep trying to find something, knowing that they likely won’t find anything, but instead will keep the story alive, keep these doubts in people’s mind and thereby set the stage to potentially successfully challenge election results if they don’t like them in the future.”
Far from being intimidated, Benson has remained in politics and is running for governor, hoping to replace Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who is term-limited and cannot run again. Whitmer infamously became the target of a failed plot to kidnap her.
“I would be happy to just be a mom of my now almost 10-year-old little boy and return to my work as a civil rights advocate and a teacher. But the work’s not done,” she said.
Watch my full interview with Secretary Benson on the All Rise News playlist of Legal AF.
All Rise News paid subscribers can watch this video and others ad-free below.
Other videos below the paywall:
* Ex-prosecutor Mitchell Epner dissects Kash Patel’s lawsuit against The Atlantic.
* Team Trump is already poisoning the jury pool in the SPLC case.
