According to a report from NBC News on Tuesday, the Harris-Walz campaign "is still negotiating with ABC News about rules for the Sept. 10 debate with Trump," even though Donald Trump has already agreed to the rules. "One of the key issues," the report notes, "is whether the candidates’ microphones should be muted when it isn’t their turn to speak."

It's obvious to anyone that the Harris campaign is looking for a way out of debating Trump next week. To still be negotiating rules that have already been agreed to less than a week before the debate is scheduled is sad and telling.

It's because Kamala's debate prep isn't going well. According to a report from NOTUS, she planning to undergo debate boot camp starting on Thursday. "She and her team will hunker down in Pennsylvania, the state where her debate with former President Donald Trump will take place next Tuesday, set to fully focus on preparing for prime time."

In conversations with nearly a dozen people involved with or aware of the preparations, a set of goals emerged for the next week. The campaign is planning to tune out as much of the outside noise as possible to lock her in, aware of Harris’ relative rust as a debater and her tendency to overprepare and fixate on the details.

The camp is co-led by Karen Dunn, a well-known D.C. lawyer who helped Harris prepare for her 2020 debate, and Rohini Kosoglu, Harris’ longtime policy guru who has been with Harris off and on since her Senate days. Other influential policy and informal advisers include Minyon Moore, fresh off a successful role chairing the Democratic National Convention; Brian Nelson, another longtime aide who now helps lead the campaign’s domestic policy shop; Tony West, her brother-in-law; Sheila Nix, her campaign chief of staff; campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond; and Sean Clegg, a strategist from California who has worked on multiple Harris campaigns.

The plan is to have mock debates to ensure that Harris is prepared and has her talking points down pat.  

"At times, according to two people familiar with the process, strategy sessions have careened sideways when the vice president focused too narrowly on minute details, effectively derailing the sessions," the report acknowledged.

Related: It Looks Like Kamala Is About To Chicken Out of Debating Trump

The article appears intent on lowering expectations as well. But it also gave the game away as to why Kamala's campaign desperately wants live microphones.

Allies say Harris has had to defend her ideas inside the White House over the last three years, preparing her in some ways for this moment. But Harris is, for all intents and purposes, an out-of-practice debater with people who aren’t her colleagues. Next week’s debate will come just a month shy of four years since she debated Vice President Mike Pence in Utah. For that, aides holed up in a hotel in Salt Lake City days before the debate, as she used index cards to work through talking points — including the now-famous “I’m speaking” line, which one person involved in the session said was a crowdsourced suggestion. [emphasis mine]

So the "I'm speaking" line was pre-planned and workshopped. Many have speculated that Kamala wants another "I'm speaking" moment, and that's why her campaign is fighting to change the rules.