Kamala Harris was quietly positioning herself to inherit former President Joe Biden’s donor network in the 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 the former vice president held on July 19, 2024, Harris assured some of the party’s biggest donors that Biden was not going anywhere.
The accusations come from 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. They appear in her book, “Unburdened: A Former Democrat Insider’s Shocking Account of Political Power, Betrayal, and Party Collapse,” which Harper is scheduled to publish on September 22, 2026 and which was excerpted September 16, 2026. Li repeated the claims in an interview with Fox News Digital. None of Li’s claims have been independently confirmed.
Li, who has also talked about the book and her rupture with the party on “Fox News Sunday,” says Harris took care to avoid any criticism of Biden even as she courted the people who would pay for 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.
The exact date eludes her, 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 flopped, by her telling. “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.
Biden’s June 2024 debate with then-former President Donald Trump, a performance widely judged a disaster, touched off mounting pressure on him to step aside. He announced on July 21, 2024, that he was suspending his campaign, and his endorsement of Harris followed less than 30 minutes after he released the letter explaining his withdrawal.
The Hours After Biden Stepped Aside
The handoff, Li also claims, was less seamless than it looked from 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, in her account, prioritized face time with the donors she believed could soon bankroll a campaign of her own.
The book also claims Harris polled last among the Democrats floated in 2024 as potential replacements for Biden, according to a further report on the book published September 17, 2026.
Celebrities figure in the allegations as well. 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, among them a claim 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.”
A Fundraiser Who Switched Sides
Li is not 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 reporting published September 16, 2026. For about a decade she was an influential Democratic donor and surrogate, holding a seat on the DNC National Finance Committee and raising money with both the Biden and Harris teams. Her criticism of Harris’ campaign spending, she says, brought attacks on her and drove her out of the party; questioning whether Harris could lead Democrats to victory, she says, got her ostracized.
She has since remade herself on the right. 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 finished with $20 million to $22 million in post-election debts.
Former allies hit back hard when she first went public in 2025. Jaime Harrison, the former DNC chair, disputed her claim that she had taken her concerns to 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,” saying she “immediately pivoted to Trump” once the election was decided and that watching it had been “heartbreaking and infuriating.”
Ashley Biden, the 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. Reporting published September 18, 2026 says the lawsuit threat arrived via Instagram and came down a day later. Li described it as having “Bordered on parody.”
Versions of this account have surfaced before. Speaking to journalist Tara Palmeri in an interview published May 7, 2025, Li said she came to believe 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. She later told Newsweek she felt “deceived” by that interview and that a book excerpt discussed in it was a rough draft she had asked not be shared.
Of her decision to publish, Li said: “I don’t think I could have lived with myself had I not told the truth,” remarks she recently made to Fox News and that were reported September 16, 2026.
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 claim rests on Li’s word alone.
