A new book by a former Democratic National Committee (DNC) fundraiser alleges that former Vice President Kamala Harris was quietly preparing to take over former President Joe Biden’s donor network in the days before he abandoned his 2024 re-election bid. On a call the author says Harris held on July 19, 2024, the vice president assured some of the party’s biggest donors that Biden was not going anywhere.
The allegations come from Lindy Li, who left the Democratic Party — an organization she has likened to a cult — after raising roughly $20 million across the Biden-Harris campaign. HarperCollins publishes her book, “Unburdened: A Former Democrat Insider’s Shocking Account of Political Power, Betrayal, and Party Collapse,” on September 22, 2026, and she has spent the past week promoting it on Fox News. None of her claims have been independently confirmed.
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 interview with Fox News Digital published September 14. “She would host calls with donors and pretend to support Biden and say there’s no daylight between Biden and herself.”
Li is not certain of 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,” she recounted the call.
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. They were very aware they were being lied to,” Li said.
Pressure on Biden to step aside mounted after his June 2024 debate with then-former President Donald Trump, widely judged a disaster. He announced the suspension of his campaign on July 21, 2024, endorsing Harris less than 30 minutes after releasing the letter that explained his withdrawal.
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 — an account at odds with the public timeline.
The book’s sharpest claim is that internal polling put Harris behind every other name under discussion. “Kamala Harris came in dead last. It wasn’t even close,” Li told Fox News in a report published September 16, naming Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer as the others tested. Party leaders went with Harris anyway, she says, partly out of fear: “People were terrified of the online mob.” Li has produced no copy of the polling, and no one else has described it.
In an excerpt published September 16, Li writes that the campaign advertised celebrities including Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny it had not booked, to pull crowds to its events. One such claim — “Beyoncé will perform on the final night of the convention!” — was, she writes, “just a lie to pack the stadium for Kamala’s acceptance speech.”
A Fundraiser Who Switched Sides
Li is not a neutral witness. A former financial analyst, she ran for Congress in 2018, lost the Democratic primary, then spent about a decade as a party donor, surrogate and fundraiser, serving on the DNC National Finance Committee and raising money for both the Biden and Harris operations. She says she came under attack for criticizing Harris’ campaign spending, and that questioning whether Harris could win got her ostracized.
Li revealed in January 2025 that she was raising money for President Trump, and she says she is supporting Republicans in the midterms. She has branded Harris’ failed presidential bid a $1 billion disaster; the campaign closed with post-election debts of $20 million to $22 million.
Former allies hit back hard when she first went public in 2025. Jaime Harrison, the former DNC chair, disputed her account that she had raised her concerns with party leadership, producing what he said was her actual message to him — a request for photo access with the vice president — and calling the contrast “Hilarious.” Author John Pavlovitz, 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.”
The Biden family pushed back too, though not recently. Ashley Biden, the former president’s daughter, threatened in February 2025 to sue Li over her claim that her father’s decline had been concealed. The threat went up on Instagram and came down a day later, and no suit followed. Li, who told Fox News on September 18 that she has photographs of earlier meetings with Ashley Biden, described the post as carrying bravado “so crude it bordered on parody.”
She told journalist Tara Palmeri, in an interview published May 7, 2025, that she began to believe in 2022 that Biden had slowed and needed notecards for simple tasks, and that she feels agony over not pressing harder. That interview left her feeling “deceived,” she later told Newsweek, adding that a book excerpt discussed in it was only a rough draft, one she had asked not be shared.
Of her decision to publish anyway, Li said: “I don’t think I could have lived with myself had I not told the truth.”
Her broader argument is unchanged: the people closest to Biden understood his campaign would likely grind to a halt after the debate, and even before it, and they said nothing. That claim, like every allegation in the book about Harris and the donors, rests on Li’s word alone. Neither Harris nor the Biden camp has answered the donor-call allegation, and no other participant on that call has come forward.