The front runner in the Democratic presidential candidacy then began with ‘the former assistant attorney general who got fired who was just in Delaware’.

He was referring to Sally Yates, a career federal prosecutor who rose to acting attorney general before Trump fired her in 2017 less than two weeks into his presidency.

She had taken the extraordinarily rare step of defying the White House and refused to defend new travel restrictions targeting seven Muslim-majority nations.

In the awkward clip Biden then went on to suggest ‘the woman who should have been the governor of Georgia’, an apparent reference to Stacey Abrams.