WASHINGTON — As a political appointee at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Lynne Patton has become one of the most prominent African-American officials in the Trump administration, and it was the color of her skin and her relationship with President Trump that led to her appearance during Michael D. Cohen’s congressional testimony on Wednesday.
Before getting her job at HUD, Ms. Patton was an event planner in New York, and worked for the Trump Organization and for the Eric Trump Foundation. Anticipating Mr. Cohen’s accusation that President Trump was a racist, Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina, invited Ms. Patton to appear as a rebuttal to the charge.
“You made some very demeaning comments about the president that Ms. Patton doesn’t agree with,” Mr. Meadows said, after Mr. Cohen called his former boss a racist and noted that, among other comments, “he told me that black people would never vote for him because they were too stupid.”
As Ms. Patton, 46, stood silently behind him, Mr. Meadows argued that Ms. Patton’s loyalty to Mr. Trump proved that could not be true.
“I asked Lynne to come today in her personal capacity to actually shed some light,” Mr. Meadows said. “She says that as a daughter of a man born in Birmingham, Ala., that there is no way that she would work for an individual who was racist.”
Mr. Meadows asked that Ms. Patton’s “entire statement be put in the record,” but Ms. Patton never opened her mouth. And shortly after Mr. Meadows called her to stand behind him, she left the chamber. But the brief cameo ignited a heated exchange about race later in the hearing.
Representative Rashida Tlaib, Democrat of Michigan, called it “insensitive” and possibly racist “to use a black woman as a prop.”
“As a person of color in this committee, that is how I felt at that moment and I wanted to express that,” she said in the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s afternoon session with Mr. Cohen. “I’m saying that in itself it is a racist act.”
Mr. Meadows fired back, noting that his own “nieces…
