“They are male minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York. That’s true in virtually every city," the clip continues. "And that’s where the real crime is. You’ve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed.”

The clip seems to have originated from Bloomberg’s speech at an Aspen Institute event in February 2015. Later that month, The Aspen Times reported that Bloomberg’s representatives had asked the Aspen Institute not to distribute footage of his appearance. A Bloomberg campaign aide did not respond to questions about whether the video would be released.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday morning quickly pounced on Bloomberg as the clip spread across Twitter, writing online: “WOW, BLOOMBERG IS A TOTAL RACIST!”

Trump, who had previously called for “stop-and-frisk” to be instituted nationwide while campaigning for president in 2016, later deleted his tweet, issuing another message mocking Bloomberg’s height and golf game.

The campaign manager and communications director for the president’s reelection effort both promoted Bloomberg’s comments from the clip in their own posts to Twitter.

In a statement, Bloomberg said that Trump’s deleted tweet “is the latest example of his endless efforts to divide Americans,” and acknowledged that “stop-and-frisk” was “overused” in New York.

“By the time I left office, I cut it back by 95%, but I should've done it faster and sooner. I regret that and I have apologized — and I have taken responsibility for taking too long to understand the impact it had on Black and Latino communities,” Bloomberg said.

“But this issue and my comments about it do not reflect my commitment to criminal justice reform and racial equity,” he added.

Just a week before launching his presidential campaign in November, Bloomberg apologized at an African American church in Brooklyn for overseeing the implementation of “stop-and-frisk” and defending the New York Police Department’s use of the law enforcement tactic — which disproportionately affected black and Latino men and has been widely denounced by critics as a civil rights violation.

“You want to spend the money on a lot of cops in the streets. Put those cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods,” Bloomberg appears to say in the recording, describing the controversial policy.

“So, [inaudible] unintended consequences is people say, ‘Oh, my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.’ Yes, that’s true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, that’s true. Why do we do it? Because that’s where all the crime is,” the clip continues.

“And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them. [Inaudible] and then they start, they say, [inaudible] ‘Oh, I don’t want to get caught.’ So they don't bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home.”

Bloomberg’s remarks began circulating Monday night on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, as his fellow Democratic presidential candidates braced for voting to begin in the second nominating state after Iowa’s caucuses.

The former New York mayor has opted to skip those early states and instead focus on amassing delegates in the more than a dozen primaries taking place in March on Super Tuesday — spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a historic television advertising blitz and a massive nationwide organization.

The investment has shown signs of paying off in recent weeks, as Bloomberg rose to third place among the field nationally in a Quinnipiac University poll published on Monday. He achieved the support of 15 percent of Democratic voters, behind only Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders with 25 percent and former Vice President Joe Biden with 17 percent.

Bloomberg also garnered the second-most support from black Democrats in the survey, with 22 percent to Biden’s 27 percent.

Sally Goldenberg contributed to this report.