A tense exchange was captured on Monday night as Vice President Kamala Harris struggled under repeated questions to explain why the number of illegal crossings at the southern border has “quadrupled” under her watch.

Harris replied with a series of verbal jujitsus that left viewers questioning whether the Democrat is ready for “prime time,” as one online critic surmised. Intrepid CBS reporter Bill Whitaker refused to let Harris weave out of a direct answer, pressing her multiple times to reflect on why it has taken three and a half years to reverse course on open border policies. For two and a half painful minutes, the vice president revised history and blamed former President Donald Trump.

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“You recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden’s recent crackdown on asylum seekers. And that crackdown produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings. If that’s the right answer now, why didn’t your administration take those steps in 2021?” Whitaker asked.

“The first bill we proposed to Congress was to fix our broken immigration system, knowing that if you want to actually fix it, we need Congress to act. It was not taken up. Fast forward to a moment when a bipartisan group of members of the United States Senate, including one of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, got together, came up with the border security bill,” Harris explained. “Well, guess what happened? Donald Trump got word that this bill was afoot and could be passed and he wants to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem, so he told his buddies in Congress, ‘Kill the bill. Don’t let it move forward.'”

In February President Trump urged Senate Republicans to quash a bill that he and party leaders claimed would have allowed for 5,000 daily illegal crossings, far more than they should permit. At Trump’s urging, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) both whipped their colleagues to oppose the legislation, which died before a vote. Since then, President Biden and Vice President Harris have attempted to hang the bill’s failure like a yoke around Trump’s neck, blaming him for the ongoing crisis at the southern border while deflecting blame for aggressive expansions of asylum policies during their first year in office.

WATCH:

“I’ve been covering the border for, for years. And so I know this is not a problem that started with your administration,” Whitaker admitted. Harris pounced on the opening, “Correct. Correct.” However, the seasoned reporter continued, “But there was an historic flood of undocumented immigrants coming across the border the first three years of your administration. As a matter of fact, arrivals quadrupled from the last year of President Trump. Was it a mistake to loosen the immigration policies as much as you did?”

“It’s a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions,” Harris countered. Whitaker clarified, “What I was asking was, was it a mistake to kind of allow that flood to happen in the first place?”

“I think– the policies that we have been proposing are about fixing a problem, not promoting a problem, okay?” she stammered back. Whitaker challenged her to admit that the number of illegal crossings “quadrupled on your watch.” “Because of what we have done,” she replied, pivoting back to an answer divorced from reality. “We have cut the flow of illegal immigration by half. We have cut the flow of fentanyl by half. But we need Congress to be able to act to actually fix the problem.”

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