Congressman Mark Meadows (R-NC) took great exception when he was accused of a “racist act” during the Michael Cohen hearing, but he once trafficked in the racist “birther” conspiracy theory by promising a crowd that they’d help “send Mr. [Barack] Obama home to Kenya.”

Meadows invited black Trump administration official Lynne Patton to the House Oversight Committee in order to argue that Trump is not racist, an act which caused Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) to condemn Meadows’s stunt as “racist,” and touching off a firestorm in the hearing. An offended Meadows demanded Tlaib’s words be stricken from the record, a request he later withdrew after considerable back-and-forth.

Despite Meadows’ protestations, however, Meadows himself once whipped up a crowd using the racist “birther” conspiracy theory, as Steve Morris flagged on Twitter.

At a Tea Party Express forum in June of 2012, Meadows took the stage and told the crowd that “the more we find out, the more we realize how wrong the directions were going.”

“And so what we’re going to do is take back our country, 2012 is the time that we’re going to send Mr. Obama home to Kenya, or wherever it is,” Meadows added. “We’re going to do it.”

Meadows would later call the remarks “a poor choice of words on my part more than anything else. I believe he’s an American citizen and I believe, in my district, he is going to lose overwhelmingly.”

But that didn’t stop him from using the lie to whip that crowd into a frenzy, which some might call a racist act.

Watch the clip above.

[Image via screengrab]

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]