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 and nephews are people of color.” Appealing to Representative Elijah E. Cummings, the chairman of the committee, Mr. Meadows insisted that “to even go down this direction is wrong.”

Mr. Cummings, a Maryland Democrat who is African-American, defended Mr. Meadows, calling him “one of my best friends.”

Ms. Tlaib then said she did not intend to call him racist. “I do apologize if that’s what it sounded like,” she said. “I said someone in general. And as everybody knows in this chamber, I’m pretty direct.”

But the idea that Ms. Patton’s mere presence and loyalty to the Trump family would somehow rebut the allegation that the president could be racist was widely and immediately criticized by Democrats, inside and outside the House chamber.

The stunt “just shows how ignorant Republicans are when it comes to race,” Karine Jean-Pierre, a senior adviser to the progressive political organizing group MoveOn.org, wrote on Twitter. “It’s also offensive and beyond the pale.”

Ms. Patton said she received an invitation from Mr. Meadows to appear at the hearing after he saw a picture on her Instagram account that she posted on Tuesday. Under a photograph of her smiling with Mr. Cohen at the Trump Grill, she described Mr. Cohen as one of her best friends for over a decade.

“I am sad that Michael would — once again, on a world stage — levy unsubstantiated claims — particularly those of bigotry and racism — against a man who has single-handedly helped raise five of the most unbiased and open-minded children I’ve ever known,” she wrote.

Ms. Patton said the statement submitted on Wednesday to the House committee was identical to a 387-word caption on her Instagram photo.

Ms. Patton, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2016, has only risen in prominence in the Trump orbit after a tell-all book by Omarosa Manigault Newman, another prominent African-American official who spent years defending Mr. Trump.

In a memoir she published after being fired from the White House in December 2017, Ms. Manigault Newman also accused Mr. Trump of being racist. And in recordings she released while promoting the book, Ms. Manigault Newman put out a taped discussion she had with Ms. Patton about whether Mr. Trump had ever used the N-word. On the tape, they discuss the possibility that Mr. Trump used the word in a recorded conversation, but it remains unclear to them if he did.

Since then, Ms. Patton, who is now HUD’s New York regional director and has recently drawn attention for spending a month in the city’s public housing, has been eager to demonstrate her loyalty to the Trump family.

But Ms. Manigault Newman, who was watching Mr. Cohen’s testimony from home, said in an interview that her former colleague was simply being used.

“Bringing Lynne in to this particular hearing was just for show,” she said. Referring to Mr. Trump’s practice of having staff members sign nondisclosure agreements, she said, “Everyone knows she’s under multiple NDA agreements, and she could not say anything disparaging about the president and the first family even if she wanted to.” Ms. Manigault-Newman added that she agreed with Mr. Cohen’s categorization of Mr. Trump as racist.

Ms. Patton denies she has a nondisclosure agreement.

“You don’t need an NDA when you’re simply telling the truth,” she said.

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