Kamala Harris caves on muted mics during debate

Vice President Kamala Harris was holding out to get her way in the upcoming ABC debate against President Donald Trump, but she's since backed down. Originally, she wanted the candidates' microphones to remain unmuted for the entire debate.

Presumably, she was hoping to catch Trump making an outburst of some kind of comment while she was speaking so that she could revisit her famed "I'm speaking" moment from her debate against Mike Pence in 2020. She and her campaign have since relented.

Harris reportedly also wanted to have a debate in which both candidates sat at tables and were able to access their notes, as her debate against Pence was staged when the two ran against each other for Vice President. The Trump camp was opposed to that, too. Now, in a letter to ABC, Harris' senior advisor for communications Brian Fallon said that the current debate format "fundamentally disadvantaged" Harris.

The idea, Politico reports someone at ABC who read the letter saying, was that muted mics would be "denying the former prosecutor the opportunity to fully cross-examine the GOP nominee."

Fallon went on to say that Trump will be "shielded" by having his mic muted. His mic, and Joe Biden's mic, were both muted during their June 27 debate in Atlanta. This was one of the conditions placed on the debate by what was then Biden's campaign. Their concern was that potential Trump comments over Biden would cause a problem for the sitting president. Harris, however, would like the reverse.

Muted mics, Fallon wrote in the letter, "will serve to shield Donald Trump from direct exchanges with the Vice President. We suspect this is the primary reason for his campaign’s insistence on muted microphones."

"We understand," he went on to say, "that Donald Trump is a risk to skip the debate altogether, as he has threatened to do previously, if we do not accede to his preferred format. We do not want to jeopardize the debate. For this reason, we accept the full set of rules proposed by ABC, including muted microphones." However, that claim is unsubstantiated.

Journalists and press will be permitted in the debate hall, though they were barred entirely in June and the two men debated before an empty auditorium. ABC said that there were no new agreements made that weren't already in place when the debate was set in May by Trump and Biden.

"Beyond the debate rules published today, which were mutually agreed upon by two campaigns on May 15, we have made no other agreements. We look forward to moderating the presidential debate next Tuesday," ABC said.

Harris has been working on debate prep in Pennsylvania and making campaign stops there. The debate will take place in Philadelphia on September 10.