Over the last several days, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign has been scrambling to contain a ballooning scandal related to a 2015 audio clip that surfaced online this week, in which the Democratic candidate can be heard defending his controversial stop-and-frisk policy as mayor.

“Ninety-five percent of your murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops. They are male, minorities, sixteen to twenty-five,” Bloomberg says in the clip. “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 … And the way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them.”

On Wednesday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser jumped into the fray, appearing on CNN to defend Bloomberg in the wake of criticism stemming from the clip. She has thrown her political weight behind Bloomberg’s presidential run, officially endorsing his campaign last month.

“Mike has expressed his mistake in supporting the policy,” Bowser said on CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront. “I know that before he left office, the practice stopped in New York City. And 95 percent of those types of stops stopped before he left office.

“The story about how he also invested in young men of color needs to be explained as well,” she added when pressed by host Erin Burnett. Bowser also told Burnett that Bloomberg’s current focus is on how he can support young men of color who have been harmed by stop and frisk, pointing to homeownership, job, and educational opportunities.

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Bowser and Bloomberg have had a close working relationship for several years now. In 2018, D.C. was chosen as one of the winners of the Bloomberg American Cities Climate Challenge, and Bowser and Bloomberg were photographed chatting at the Bloomberg Health Summit that same year. Bloomberg has spoken glowingly about Bowser’s work as mayor, saying during the U.S. Conference of Mayors in January that “she is doing a terrific job, and I hope that someday soon we’ll be calling her ‘Governor Bowser.'”

In endorsing him, Bowser said Bloomberg is “the only candidate who will unify the country and defeat Donald Trump and has a blueprint to rebuild America and improve the quality of life for all Americans.”

A representative for the mayor didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from DCist.

On Wednesday, following the controversy, Bloomberg said he doesn’t think the 2015 comments “reflect how I led the most diverse city in the nation. And I apologized for the practice and the pain that it caused,” he said, per CBS News.

Bowser is certainly not the only prominent politician to look past Bloomberg’s comments and previous policies in endorsing his run for the presidency. On Wednesday, Bloomberg announced he had the support of three members of the Congressional Black Caucus: Reps. Lucy McBath of Georgia, Gregory Meeks of New York, and Stacey Plaskett of the Virgin Islands. Bloomberg also has the support of numerous mayors across the country, including most recently Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner.