A former Democratic National Committee (DNC) fundraiser alleges in a new book 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 — and that on a call she says Harris 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 leaving the Democratic Party, which 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,” and she repeated them in an interview with Fox News Digital. None of Li’s claims have been independently confirmed.

Li, who has also discussed her break with the party and the book on “Fox News Sunday,” says Harris stayed well clear of any criticism of Biden while courting 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 is not certain of the date, but places 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.

By her telling, the pitch 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. She called the approach insulting.

Pressure on Biden to step aside mounted after his June 2024 debate with then-former President Donald Trump, a performance widely judged a disaster. Biden announced he was suspending his campaign on July 21, 2024, and endorsed Harris less than 30 minutes after releasing the letter explaining his withdrawal.

The Hours After Biden Stepped Aside

“She was flattering people left and right. The first 24 hours were a very intensive charm offensive on her part. And that’s how she was able to consolidate it so quickly,” Li said.

Li also claims the handoff was less seamless than it looked from the outside, saying Biden “didn’t want to endorse her right away” and took a while to do it. In her account, Harris prioritized face time with the donors she believed could soon bankroll a campaign of her own.

A Fundraiser Who Switched Sides

Li is not a neutral witness. She spent about a decade as an influential Democratic donor and surrogate, sat on the DNC National Finance Committee and worked with both the Biden and Harris teams to raise money. She says she left the party after coming under attack for criticizing Harris’ campaign spending, and that she was ostracized for questioning whether Harris could lead Democrats to victory.

Since then she has repositioned herself on the right. In January 2025, Li revealed 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 ended up with $20 million to $22 million in post-election debts.

Her turn drew sharp pushback from former allies when she first went public in 2025. Jaime Harrison, the former DNC chair, disputed her claim 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,” saying she “immediately pivoted to Trump” once the election was decided and that watching it had been “heartbreaking and infuriating.”

Li has aired versions of this account before. In an interview with journalist Tara Palmeri published May 7, 2025, she said she began 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.

She now offers 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. That claim, like every allegation in the book about Harris and the donors, rests on Li’s word alone.