Kamala Harris has spent the last five weeks running away from the media, which clearly has no issues with her refusal to engage. As of this afternoon, her campaign website still has no information on her agenda or policy positions. Harris or her handlers don't even feel confident enough in her grasp of issues for her to talk to CNN's Dana Bash without Tim Walz as a minder/wingman/chaperone.

Will Bash force Harris to address these gaps, and put her on the spot over her flip-flops? Perhaps; Bash and Jake Tapper did a credible job in the debate between Donald Trump and the actual nominee, Joe Biden, two months ago. Having Walz as wingman will absorb some of that emphasis on softballs about their relationship, but Bash at some point has to address hard questions.

The one question by which we can judge her integrity is about how Harris ended up being the nominee at all. What did Kamala know about Biden's cognitive decline? When did she know it? And why didn't Harris speak out before the debate?

This is no mere academic question. We have just witnessed an unprecedented removal of an elected nominee -- and an incumbent president -- between the primaries and the general election. Harris then got the nomination by decree of the party establishment rather than by the will of primary voters, and not even by a competitive process among their elected delegates to the nominating convention. That has never happened in the modern history of primary elections for major-party nominations, and the reason it took place this time is because Joe Biden's cognitive impairment got so thoroughly exposed on national television on June 27.

This goes far beyond June 27, and everyone knows it. The White House, including Harris, lied about Biden's cognitive status for years. While the staff sent the Easter Bunny out to prevent Biden from engaging reporters in April 2022, Harris and the West Wing told everyone that asked that Biden had more stamina than staffers half his age and that no one in the White House could keep up with him intellectually.

After the CNN debate, that narrative fell apart completely. Carl Bernstein revealed almost two months ago that everyone in the administration knew Biden was failing. A week later, the Wall Street Journal reported that "senior White House advisers" had known "for more than a year," because they had "aggressively stage-managed" Biden to keep his decline from being exposed. 

Isn't Kamala Harris one of those "senior advisers"? Both the White House and Harris have claimed she is. 

In fact, the New York Times reported this afternoon that Senate Democrats got angry after the debate after not being warned about how bad Biden's condition actually was:

Senator Jack Reed, the West Point graduate, Army veteran and Rhode Island Democrat who leads the Armed Services Committee, is hardly known as a troublemaker prone to rash statements.

So when Senate Democrats gathered privately with President Biden’s top political advisers last month to assess Mr. Biden’s capacity to remain the Democratic presidential nominee, the decision by the normally taciturn Mr. Reed to be among the first to speak was notable. What was even more remarkable was what he said, according to two attendees: If Mr. Biden wanted to stay in the race after a disastrous debate performance that underscored concerns about his condition and mental acuity, he should submit to examination by two independent neurologists who were willing to report their findings at a news conference.

It was a striking position for a Democratic loyalist to take, and one that underscored the near unanimity among Senate Democrats in the room that day that Mr. Biden should not continue as the party’s nominee. 

This underscores the obvious point about the unprecedented moves Democrats made over the last five weeks. They didn't push Biden off the ticket because of a few bad polls. They forced him to withdraw because he's cognitively incompetent to run for another term, and likely cognitively incompetent to continue in office right now. 

Bash certainly knows that. She was there when the cover-up fell apart and Biden's impairment got fully exposed. Who better to ask about what happened than Bash, given her ringside seat for Biden's ghastly display of decline? And even more to the point, who better to demand an answer to the question of who's running the executive branch now.

And if she fails to ask these questions, that will speak volumes about her integrity, and CNN's.