The relationship between President Joe Biden’s White House and Eric Adams began breaking down in private months earlier than previously known – and long before the New York mayor started publicly blasting the president over the migrant crisis in his city.

“There’s no leadership here,” Adams told a group of Biden aides last October in the chief of staff’s office, demanding the president do more to help his city handle a massive influx of migrants.

The issue is one of the most sensitive issues for the White House, and for Biden’s reelection campaign. Intergovernmental affairs director Julie Chávez Rodríguez, chief of staff Ron Klain and Homeland Security Adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall bristled. They were doing everything they could at the White House to lead without Congress pitching in, they said. Biden had done more than any previous president and much of what Adams was asking for would either require congressional action or would likely immediately be challenged in court.

It was a moment, which is being reported now for the first time, that prefaced a total breakdown of the relationship between the White House and the mayor’s office. CNN’s conversations with multiple sources revealed the political partnership has devolved into finger-pointing and frustration between Adams, the president, their aides and advocates who complain that the leaders have both been blundering through a response to a crisis that more than one told CNN feels like “playing hot potato with people.”