John Hickenlooper went off on a climate activist after he asked if the former Colorado governor would apologize for suing a city that had banned fracking.
“No, no, no, shh,” Hickenlooper said in a video posted Monday after a young man asked him about a 2013 lawsuit against Longmont, Colorado.
“Hold on, hold — don’t shout at me, don’t shout at me,” the former Democratic presidential candidate told the activist before putting his hands on him.
The video was originally posted on Twitter by the environmentalist group Sunrise Movement before eventually being taken down.
“Gov. Hickenlooper thinks he can get away with suing his own constituents AND still get enough support to run for congress,” the organization said in the since-deleted caption. “No one who would put people’s lives at risk for the sake of helping big oil execs deserves to be in office. We demand better.”
The video ends after a Hickenlooper aide intervened and led the former governor out of the room.
“How can we trust you to fight for us, Gov. Hickenlooper?” the activist asked as the candidate left the room.
The altercation comes as Hickenlooper remains the favorite to win the Senate Democratic primary in Colorado. If he wins, he would face Republican Sen. Cory Gardner in a race that could determine which party controls the Senate after the 2020 presidential election.
Hickenlooper, 67, was governor of Colorado from 2011 to 2019 and is running for the Senate as a business-minded Democrat. He previously ran an unsuccessful campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination in which he failed to gain much more than single-digit support in the polls. He dropped out of the race in August.
