Rep. Rashida Tlaib said Thursday that she and others in the House Oversight Committee room gasped on Wednesday when Rep. Mark Meadows pointed to a black Trump administration official as evidence that President Donald Trump is not racist, condemning Meadows’ move as racist.
“I think all of us, I mean, even folks at home kind of gasped when that actually happened,” Tlaib (D-Mich.) said on CNN Thursday morning. “I think if we want to talk about race in this country, that was not the way do it.”
During his high-profile public testimony before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen levied a number of allegations against the president, including that Trump repeatedly disparaged African-Americans. Republican committee members spent most of their time during the hearing trying to discredit Cohen, who is slated to begin a prison sentence in May for a series of crimes, including lying to Congress.
Meadows (R-N.C.) introduced longtime Trump Organization employee and current Department of Housing and Urban Development staffer Lynne Patton, who is black, to rebut Cohen’s allegations of Trump’s racism. Meadows asked Patton to stand before the committee and spoke on her behalf — a move that was criticized as tokenizing and ineffective in disproving Trump’s alleged racism.
