Forcefully rejecting an accusation that she was used as a “prop,” Lynne Patton, a Trump administration official, defended her appearance at a House hearing to refute Michael Cohen’s claims that Trump was a racist.
“I was not there to represent an entire race of people. I was there to represent one man,” Patton, who is African-American, told “Fox & Friends” on Thursday, adding that the president’s economic policies have benefited people of color.
Cohen told the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday that Trump is a “racist” and accused the president of making comments “disparaging African-Americans” while in the White House.
Patton, who has been a longtime friend of the Trump family and is a regional administrator for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said the president is colorblind.
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The president does not see color, race, creed, religion. What he sees is success and failure,” Patton told the Fox show. “To me, that’s what makes people uncomfortable. He doesn’t care what people think and he’s going to tell it like it is.”
Patton appeared at the hearing Wednesday as the guest of Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), who said she doesn’t agree with Cohen’s description of the president.
“She says as a daughter of a man born in Birmingham, Ala., that there is no way that she would work for an individual who was a racist,” said Meadows, head of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
Several Democratic female lawmakers on the panel questioned Meadows bringing Patton to the hearing, but the situation grew intense when Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib claimed Meadows’ tactic was racist.
“Just because someone has a person of color, a black person working for them does not mean that they aren’t racist,” Tlaib said at the hearing. “And it is insensitive that the fact that someone would use a prop, a black woman, in this chamber, in this committee, is alone racist in itself.”
Patton on Fox called Cohen a “self-confessed perjurer” and questioned why Tlaib would side with him.
“Why does she take the word of a self-confessed perjurer and criminally convicted white man over a black female who’s highly educated, worked up through the ranks of the most competitive companies in real estate, spoke before 25 million people at the Republican National Convention, and now works in one of the most historic administrations in history,” Patton said. “That’s more racist than being put up there as a quote unquote ‘prop.'”
Tlaib defended her actions during an interview Thursday on CNN.
“At that moment it was important for me to speak truth to power,” she said on “New Day.” “It was important for me to speak out against that action that I thought was very hurtful and very painful for many of us sitting in that committee room.”
After Meadows’ stunt, a video from 2012 resurfaced on Thursday showing him vowing to send former President Obama “back to Kenya,” an embrace of the birther movement that falsely asserted Obama wasn’t born in the US.
He distanced himself from the comment on Thursday, telling CNN that’s “not something that I support.”
Cohen is scheduled to report to prison May 6 to begin serving a three-year sentence.
He pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations, lying to Congress and tax evasion last fall in Manhattan federal court.