Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib apologized after she called Representative Mark Meadows “racist” during Michael Cohen’s heated congressional hearing Wednesday.
The freshman Michigan Democrat had choice words for Meadows after the North Carolina conservative introduced Lynne Patton, who is black and a former employee of the Trump Organization, in an effort to dismantle the claim from Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer, that Trump is racist.
Patton, now an official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, “doesn’t agree with” Cohen’s charge that the president holds racist views, Meadows told Cohen.
“Just because someone has a person of color, a black person, working for them does not mean they aren’t racist,” an emotional Tlaib said later in the hearing. “It is insensitive, the fact that someone would actually use a prop, a black woman, in this chamber, in this committee, is alone racist in itself.”
Afterwards, Tlaib corrected herself, saying she apologized if it sounded like she was calling Meadows racist.
“To my colleague, Mr. Meadows, that was not my intention. I do apologize if that’s what it sounded like,” she said. “But I said ‘someone’ in general. As everybody knows in this chamber, I’m pretty direct, so if I wanted to say that I would have but that’s not what I said.”
“I was not referring to you at all as a racist,” the congresswoman said, adding that Meadows’s actions are still a “racist act.”
Meadows asked that Tlaib’s comments be stricken from the record as a personal attack on him.
“My nieces and nephews are people of color. Not many people know that. You know that Mr. Chairman,” Meadows said to Democratic committee chair Elijah Cummings. “To indicate that I asked someone who is a personal friend of the Trump family, who has worked for him, who knows this particular individual, that she’s coming in to be a prop, it is racist to suggest that I ask her to come in here for that reason.”
“She came in because she felt like the president was being falsely accused,” Meadows said.
“I could see and feel your pain, I feel it,” Cummings, who is black, responded to the Freedom Caucus head. “And so I don’t think Ms. Tlaib intended to cause you that, that kind of pain and frustration.”
Tlaib, the first Palestinian-American woman ever elected to Congress, made headlines last month when she promised that the House is “going to impeach the motherf*****,” speaking about Trump.