A new book by a former Democratic National Committee (DNC) fundraiser alleges that, in the days before former President Joe Biden abandoned his 2024 re-election bid, former Vice President Kamala Harris was quietly preparing to take over his donor network. Some of the party’s biggest donors, the fundraiser alleges, were assured by Harris on a call she says Harris held on July 19, 2024 that Biden was not going anywhere.
Lindy Li is the source of the accusations. She says she raised roughly $20 million across the Biden-Harris campaign before leaving the Democratic Party, an organization she has likened to a cult. They appear in “Unburdened: A Former Democrat Insider’s Shocking Account of Political Power, Betrayal, and Party Collapse,” which Harper is publishing with a September 22, 2026 release date. Li repeated the accusations in an interview with Fox News Digital, and no independent confirmation of any of her claims exists.
Li has also discussed her break with the party and the book on “Fox News Sunday.” In a post on X on September 14, 2026 tied to that appearance, she wrote: “After I exposed how disastrous Biden’s campaign was, I was immediately excommunicated by the Biden White House and never spoke with Biden again I lost everything when I told the truth Huge thanks to the conservatives who have welcomed me in like family”. By her account, criticism of Biden was something Harris stayed well clear of even as she courted the people who would fund whatever came next.
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.
“She would host calls with donors and pretend to support Biden and say there’s no daylight between Biden and herself,” Li said.
She cannot pin down the date, 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, describing the approach as insulting. His June 2024 debate with then-former President Donald Trump, a performance widely judged a disaster, sent Pressure on Biden to step aside mounting. Biden announced on July 21, 2024 that he was suspending his campaign, and the letter explaining his withdrawal was followed by his endorsement of Harris less than 30 minutes later.
The Hours After Biden Stepped Aside
The handoff was less seamless than it looked from the outside, Li also claims, saying Biden “didn’t want to endorse her right away” and took a while to do it. Harris, in her account, prioritized face time with the donors she believed could soon bankroll a campaign of her own.
Another allegation appears in a first-person excerpt from the book published September 16, 2026. “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,” Li wrote of the Chicago convention, where she attended as a National Finance Committee member.
The book carries a further claim about where Harris stood in the field of possible 2024 Democratic replacements for Biden: that she polled last among them. That claim surfaced in coverage of the book on September 16, 2026.
A Fundraiser Who Switched Sides
Li worked as a financial analyst before politics. She ran for Congress in 2018 and lost in the Democratic primary, then became a DNC fundraiser, raising millions for Biden in 2020 and Harris in 2024. She is not a neutral witness: about a decade as an influential Democratic donor and surrogate, a seat on the DNC National Finance Committee, and money-raising work alongside both the Biden and Harris teams. Criticism of Harris’ campaign spending brought attacks on her that, she says, drove her out of the party, and her questions about whether Harris could lead Democrats to victory got her ostracized. Asked why she went public, Li told Fox News, in the excerpt published September 16, 2026: “I don’t think I could have lived with myself had I not told the truth.”
The right is where she has since repositioned herself. Li revealed in January 2025 that she was raising money for President Trump, and Republicans are who she says she is supporting in the midterms. A $1 billion disaster is her branding for Harris’ failed presidential bid, which ended up with $20 million to $22 million in post-election debts.
When she first went public in 2025, former allies hit back hard. Her claim that she had raised her concerns with party leadership was disputed by 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.” Author John Pavlovitz said he had worked closely with Li on a large Harris fundraiser, and he called her “such a complete fraud who has lost any moral compass she had,” saying she “immediately pivoted to Trump” once the election was decided and that watching it had been “heartbreaking and infuriating.”
Versions of this account are not new. Li told journalist Tara Palmeri, in an interview published May 7, 2025, that Biden had slowed by 2022, as she came to believe, needing notecards for simple tasks at events, and that not pressing her concerns harder leaves her feeling agony. Newsweek later heard from her that the interview had left her feeling “deceived,” and that a rough draft she had asked not be shared was the book excerpt discussed in it.
What she offers now is a fuller version of the same argument: that the people closest to Biden understood his campaign would likely grind to a halt after the debate, and even before it, and that they said nothing. Like every allegation in the book about Harris and the donors, that one rests on Li’s word alone.
