Former Vice President Kamala Harris was quietly positioning herself to inherit former President Joe Biden’s donor network in the final days before he abandoned his 2024 re-election bid, a former Democratic National Committee (DNC) fundraiser alleges in a new book — and on a call she says Harris held on July 19, 2024, she assured some of the party’s biggest donors that he was not going anywhere.
The author is Lindy Li, who says she raised roughly $20 million across the Biden-Harris campaign before walking away from the Democratic Party, an organization she has likened to a cult. Her book, “Unburdened: A Former Democrat Insider’s Shocking Account of Political Power, Betrayal, and Party Collapse,” is scheduled for publication by Harper on September 22, 2026, and an excerpt ran September 16, 2026. She repeated the allegations in an interview with Fox News Digital. None of Li’s claims have been independently confirmed.
Li has also talked about the book and her split with the party on “Fox News Sunday.” Her charge is that Harris steered clear of any criticism of Biden while courting the people who would fund whatever came next.
Li’s Account of the Donor 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 does not pin the date down with certainty, but 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, in her telling, fell flat. “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. She called the approach insulting.
Calls for Biden to step aside grew louder after his June 2024 debate against then-former President Donald Trump, a performance widely judged a disaster. On July 21, 2024, the president announced he was suspending his campaign. A letter explaining his withdrawal went out first, and his endorsement of Harris followed less than 30 minutes later.
What Happened After Biden Stepped Aside
The handoff, Li claims, was messier than it appeared from the outside. She says Biden “didn’t want to endorse her right away” and took a while to do it — an account at odds with the public timeline. Harris, she says, prioritized face time with the donors she believed could soon bankroll a campaign of her own.
The book also puts Harris last in polling among the potential 2024 Democratic replacements for Biden, according to reporting published September 17, 2026.
In a book excerpt published September 16, 2026, Li writes that the Harris campaign lied about celebrities including Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny to attract and exploit crowds. One such claim, she writes, was that “Beyoncé will perform on the final night of the convention!” — which she describes as “just a lie to pack the stadium for Kamala’s acceptance speech.”
The Fundraiser Who Switched Sides
Li is hardly a neutral witness. A former financial analyst, she ran for Congress in 2018 and lost in the Democratic primary before becoming a DNC fundraiser, according to an account published September 16, 2026. For about a decade she was an influential Democratic donor and surrogate, she sat on the DNC National Finance Committee, and she raised money with both the Biden and Harris teams. Critics of Harris’ campaign spending came in for attack, she says, and her own departure from the party followed; questioning whether Harris could lead Democrats to victory, by her account, got her ostracized.
She has since repositioned herself on the right. A January 2025 revelation from Li confirmed that she was raising money for President Trump, and she says she is supporting Republicans in the midterms. She describes Harris’ failed presidential bid as a $1 billion disaster; the campaign was left with $20 million to $22 million in post-election debts.
When she first went public in 2025, former allies hit back hard. The former DNC chair, Jaime Harrison, disputed that she had ever raised her concerns with party leadership. He produced what he said was her actual message to him — a request for photo access with the vice president — and called the contrast “Hilarious.” Working closely with Li on a large Harris fundraiser was something author John Pavlovitz said he had done, and he called her “such a complete fraud who has lost any moral compass she had.” Once the election was decided, Pavlovitz said, she “immediately pivoted to Trump,” and watching it had been “heartbreaking and infuriating.”
The Biden family has objected as well. Ashley Biden, daughter of former President Joe Biden and former First Lady Jill Biden, threatened to sue Li over her claim that Biden’s decline was covered up. The lawsuit threat came via Instagram and was taken down a day later, according to reporting published September 18, 2026; Li described it as having “Bordered on parody.”
This is not the first airing of the account. Speaking to journalist Tara Palmeri in an interview published May 7, 2025, Li said a conviction had taken hold of her in 2022 that Biden had slowed and needed notecards for simple tasks at events, and that she feels agony over not pressing her concerns harder. Newsweek later heard from her that she felt “deceived” by that conversation, and that the book excerpt it touched on had been a rough draft she asked to be kept private.
Li has defended her decision to publish. “I don’t think I could have lived with myself had I not told the truth,” she recently told Fox News, in remarks reported September 16, 2026.
In the fuller version she now offers, Biden’s closest confidants knew the campaign would likely grind to a halt after the debate, and even before it, and said nothing. Like every allegation in the book about Harris and the donors, that rests on Li’s word alone.