President Barack Obama called hip-hop musician Kanye West a "jackass" on Monday in an off-the-record comment during an interview with CNBC, an ABC News anchor reported on Twitter.

Click here to listen to the audio recording.

Obama was apparently weighing in on an interruption that occurred the night before during the MTV Video Music Awards where West grabbed the microphone from teen country singer Taylor Swift during her award acceptance speech to announce his belief that Beyonce had a better music video.

"Pres. Obama just called Kanye West a 'jackass' for his outburst at VMAs when Taylor Swift won. Now THAT'S presidential," "Nightline" co-anchor Terry Moran wrote Monday evening to his more than 1 million followers.

The tweet forced the network to issue an apology after the Internet quickly became abuzz over the stunning remark published on the microblogging site.

An ABC spokesperson said, "In the process of reporting on remarks by President Obama that were made during a CNBC interview, ABC News employees prematurely tweeted a portion of those remarks that turned out to be from an off-the-record portion of the interview," Politico reported. "This was done before our editorial process had been completed. That was wrong. We apologize to the White House and CNBC and are taking steps to ensure that it will not happen again."

Moran's tweet has since been deleted, but can still be accessed.

West, who is no stranger to controversy, apologized for the incident after Sunday night's MTV broadcast and again Monday night during an interview on the premiere of NBC's "Jay Leno Show." 

West told Leno he's going to take some time off to reflect and that "it was rude, period."

"I need to, after this, take some time off and just analyze how I'm going to make it through the rest of this life, how I'm going to improve. If there's anything I could do to help Taylor in the future or help anyone, I'd like to," he said.

The White House had no immediate comment on the matter, Politico reported.