Tom Steyer crashed an intense conversation between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders when the Warren appeared to decline to shake Sanders’s hand after the January Democratic debate.
But Steyer, a billionaire businessman, could not reveal details about the conversation.
“They were talking about getting together or something, I didn’t hear,” Steyer, 62, said on CNN after Tuesday’s debate. “You could see it’s an awkward moment.”
“Look, I was just going up to say ‘Good night,'” he added, “and I felt like, OK, I feel like something’s going on.”
Steyer also addressed the moment while speaking to MSNBC in the spin room.
“I don’t know what they were saying,” Steyer said. “All I was trying to say was, to both Sen. Warren and Sen. Sanders, was, ‘Great to see you, thank you for participating in this.'”
“Whatever they were going on between each other, I was trying to get out of the way as fast as possible,” Steyer added.
Steyer on that Warren-Bernie non-handshake: “whatever they were talking about I was trying to get out of the way as fast as possible” https://t.co/XKwHimaMrT pic.twitter.com/mOrPUAh3uU
— Alex Thompson (@AlxThomp) January 15, 2020
During the debate the two senators were asked to address Warren’s allegation that Sanders told her in a 2018 private meeting that he did not think a woman could win the presidency in 2020.
“Well, as a matter of fact, I didn’t say it. Anybody who knows me knows that it’s incomprehensible that I do not believe a woman could not become president of the United States,” Sanders, 78, said on the debate stage. “This is what Donald Trump and some of the media want.”
Warren, 70, gave a different version of events.
“I disagreed,” she said. “Can a woman beat Donald Trump? Look at the men on stage. Collectively, they have lost 10 elections. The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in are the women. Amy and me,” she said, referring to Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, 59.
