A new book by a former Democratic National Committee (DNC) fundraiser alleges that former Vice President Kamala Harris spent the closing days of former President Joe Biden’s 2024 re-election bid quietly preparing to take over his donor network. On a call the author says Harris convened on July 19, 2024, the vice president told some of the party’s biggest donors that Biden intended to stay in the race.
Lindy Li, who says she raised roughly $20 million across the Biden-Harris campaign before leaving the Democratic Party, is the accuser; she has likened that organization to a cult. Harper published her allegations on September 22, 2026, in “Unburdened: A Former Democrat Insider’s Shocking Account of Political Power, Betrayal, and Party Collapse,” and Fox News Digital heard the same account from her in an interview. Fox News Digital reported Li’s account, but her allegation that Harris used the July 2024 donor call to position herself for Biden’s donors has not been independently confirmed.
Li has also discussed the book and her break with the party on “Fox News Sunday.” Harris, she says, was courting the people who would fund whatever came next, all while staying well clear of any criticism of Biden.
What Li Says About the Call
“It was all charade. She was auditioning for Biden’s endorsement, and the way that she did it was by imposing a fake rule on her staff to not talk about her ascending to the nomination,” Li said in an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.
“I was on the call; she would host calls with donors and pretend to support Biden and say there’s no daylight between Biden and herself. All the while she was auditioning for those very donors,” she told Fox News Digital.
The exact date escapes Li, though she puts the call roughly 48 hours before Biden quit the race. “It was either on July 19th or July 20th. Actually, I think it was July 19, 2024; Kamala Harris held a call saying that there was no way that Biden would drop out and that she would stick with him until the end. And these were some of the biggest donors in the party,” Li said.
The pitch, by her telling, did not land. “A lot of us have group chats. And the immediate reaction is what an effing waste of time. What a charade, how fake. Like these are like the wealthiest people in the country saying that. They were very aware they were being lied to,” Li said. The approach, in her words, was insulting. Pressure on Biden to step aside mounted after a performance widely judged a disaster: his June 2024 debate with then-former President Donald Trump. Biden announced on July 21, 2024, that he was suspending his campaign, and less than 30 minutes after the letter explaining his withdrawal went out, he endorsed Harris.
The Hours After Biden Stepped Aside
The handoff was less seamless than it looked from the outside, Li claims, saying Biden “didn’t want to endorse her right away” and took a while to do it — an account at odds with the public timeline. Once Biden made his announcement, she says, Harris moved aggressively within the Democratic camp to shore up support, insinuating she had some form of Biden’s backing. “She was flattering people left and right,” Li told Fox News Digital. Harris, by this telling, put face time with the donors she believed could soon bankroll a campaign of her own ahead of everything else.
In a book excerpt published under her own byline on September 16, Li writes that the Harris campaign lied about celebrity appearances to fill venues: “Beyoncé will perform on the final night of the convention! Just kidding — that was just a lie to pack the stadium for Kamala’s acceptance speech.” In the excerpt, Li alleges that the Harris campaign misled supporters about appearances by Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny in an effort to attract larger crowds.
A Fundraiser Who Switched Sides
Li is not a neutral witness. A seat on the DNC National Finance Committee came with her decade or so as an influential Democratic donor and surrogate, during which she worked with both the Biden and Harris teams to raise money. Criticism of Harris’ campaign spending brought attacks on her, she says, and she left the party afterward; questioning whether Harris could lead Democrats to victory got her ostracized.
The right is where she has repositioned herself since. Li revealed in January 2025 that she was raising money for President Trump, and Republicans have her support in the midterms, she says. Li has branded Harris’ presidential bid a ‘$1 billion disaster’ and claimed after the election that the campaign was deeply in debt. However, the campaign’s year-end 2024 filing with the Federal Election Commission reported about $934,000 in debts and obligations, along with about $1.76 million in cash on hand.
Former allies pushed back sharply when she first went public in 2025. Her claim that she had raised her concerns with party leadership drew a dispute from Jaime Harrison, the former DNC chair, who produced what he said was her actual message to him — a request for photo access with the vice president — and called the contrast “Hilarious.” John Pavlovitz, an author who said he had worked closely with Li on a large Harris fundraiser, called her “such a complete fraud who has lost any moral compass she had,” said she “immediately pivoted to Trump” once the election was decided, and said watching it had been “heartbreaking and infuriating.”
By Li’s account, the Biden family pushed back too. She says Ashley Biden, the former president’s daughter, threatened to sue her over her claims of a cover-up of Biden’s decline in an Instagram post that Li says appeared in February of last year and was taken down a day later. Li writes in “Unburdened” that the post read: “This woman is a bonavide [sic] liar. Karma is a real bad b—-, Lindy.” Li told Fox News Digital: “They wanted to scare me. That was the goal.”
Li showed Fox News Digital screenshots of the post and said it was odd that Ashley Biden claimed not to know who she was. The two had met on a number of occasions, Li said, and she shared photos of them together with Fox News Digital. “Doesn’t even pass the smell test,” Li said.
Versions of this account have surfaced before. Journalist Tara Palmeri published an interview on May 7, 2025, in which Li dated to 2022 her growing belief that Biden had slowed and needed notecards for simple tasks at events, adding that not pressing her concerns harder leaves her in agony. Newsweek later heard from her that she felt “deceived” by that interview, and that the book excerpt discussed in it had been a rough draft she asked not be shared.
Li now presses a fuller version of the same argument: after the debate and even before it, the people closest to Biden understood that his campaign would likely grind to a halt, and they said nothing. That claim, like every allegation in the book about Harris and the donors, rests on Li’s word alone.