A former Democratic National Committee fundraiser says she plans to expose, by name, the party officials who knew about President Joe Biden's cognitive decline and said nothing, and she claims to have the private texts and internal polling data to back it up.
Lindy Li, who has since switched party affiliation, told Fox News Digital in an exclusive phone interview that her upcoming book, titled Unburdened, will lay out who inside the Democratic Party privately pushed for Biden to leave the 2024 race while publicly defending him.
The book, set for publication later this year, amounts to an insider's indictment of a party that Li says chose self-preservation over honesty with voters, and is now paying the price.
Li's central claim is blunt. She told Fox News Digital that leading Democrats privately wanted Biden gone long before anyone said so publicly.
"Whatever was out there, it wasn't the truth. They wanted him to go, and also in my book, I will be telling people exactly who was aware of Biden's cognitive decline but pretended otherwise."
One name she singled out: Senator Adam Schiff of California. Li said she received a private text from Schiff, then a House Democrat and Senate candidate, that showed he wanted Biden out of the race well before he made any public statement to that effect.
"I remember getting a text from Schiff. I have it in my book. Basically, Adam Schiff was, I can't remember what he said on TV, but I'm telling you right now that behind the scenes he very much wanted [Biden] to go."
A spokesperson for Schiff responded with a one-line statement: "The Senator's concerns and call on President Biden to not run was very public, so none of this is news." Schiff publicly called on Biden to step aside in July 2024, after a debate in which Biden stumbled over his words, lost his train of thought, and spoke in a whispery voice, Fox News Digital reported.
But the gap between Schiff's private urgency and his public timeline is precisely Li's point. She argues that top Democrats knew the situation was dire and kept quiet, not out of loyalty to Biden, but out of fear.
Li described a party frozen in place by a combination of Biden's personal relationships and cold political math. She said multiple potential challengers quietly polled themselves against Biden in a primary scenario and found they could not win.
"They didn't want to get [ostracized by the party.] It's like the axiom: you come at the king; you better not miss. Everyone would have missed."
The motive, she said, was not anti-Trump solidarity. It was raw calculation.
"There are many candidates who [polled themselves against Biden] and then realized that they couldn't beat him in a primary. It wasn't a matter so much of anti-Trumpism. It was self-interest."
Li also pointed to Biden's deep institutional ties, decades of loyalty that made him nearly untouchable within the party. She cited his bond with figures like James Clyburn, the longtime Democratic power broker who had helped steer the party for years. "There's something about Joe Biden. He was incredibly kind," Li said.
Kindness, however, does not excuse a coverup. And Li's account describes something closer to an institutional conspiracy of silence than a good-faith disagreement about a candidate's fitness.
Li's book also promises to include internal polling data she says has never been made public, data that, if accurate, would raise hard questions about how the Democratic Party settled on Kamala Harris as Biden's replacement.
"I also have polling data right before Kamala ascended. We stacked her against Buttigieg, Newsom, Shapiro, Whitmer, all of them."
Her verdict on Harris was unsparing: Li called her "the weakest candidate in the field." If the polling data in the book supports that claim, it will confirm what many conservatives argued at the time, that Harris was not chosen on merit but anointed by a panicked party that had run out of options after Biden's belated exit.
Biden ultimately dropped out of the 2024 race. The New York Post reported that he left the race on July 21 and endorsed Harris within 30 minutes, a move Li previously characterized as a deliberate affront to the party that denied Democrats an open primary process. The Harris-Walz campaign went on to raise at least $1 billion, with total aligned spending exceeding $1.6 billion, yet ended up $20 million in debt after Trump swept all seven battleground states.
Li did not hold back about that outcome either. She previously called the Harris campaign "an epic disaster" and "a $1 billion disaster," saying she and other donors were promised by campaign manager Jen O'Malley Dillon that Harris would win.
Li's forthcoming book appears to build on claims she has already begun making publicly. Breitbart reported that Li identified several senior White House figures, including Anthony Bernal, Jill Biden's chief of staff; Bruce Reed; Steve Richetti; Anita Dunn; and Mike Donilon, as people who she claims effectively ran the Biden White House while the president was declining.
Li described the arrangement in stark terms, calling it "elder abuse" and saying Jill Biden "very much knew what she was doing." She also alleged that former domestic policy advisor Neera Tanden played a role in the use of the presidential autopen when Biden was allegedly unable to fulfill his duties.
Those claims have drawn congressional attention. The House Oversight Committee has begun investigating an alleged coverup of Biden's mental decline, and Bernal, after initially confirming a voluntary interview, reportedly refused to appear after executive privilege was waived.
Meanwhile, Biden himself has been fighting legal battles over what records from his presidency become public. A federal judge recently denied Biden's effort to suppress ghostwriter recordings, and his lawyers have separately moved to block the DOJ's release of 70 hours of ghostwriter audio. The pattern is consistent: an ex-president and his circle working hard to keep the public from hearing and seeing what happened behind closed doors.
Li's revelations land at a moment when the Democratic Party is struggling to find its footing. Fox News Digital's headline described the party as "completely rudderless," and the facts support that characterization. The billion-dollar Harris campaign collapsed. Biden's exit was chaotic. And the party's internal polling, if Li's claims hold up, showed its leaders knew they were sending their weakest option into a general election.
The broader crisis of Democratic leadership is not just Li's story to tell. Senator Cory Booker has said Democrats "desperately" need new leadership as the party struggles ahead of the midterms. And when Democratic leaders do face tough questions about the Biden era's failures, from the economy to the campaign itself, they often stumble.
Li's claims are, for now, exactly that, claims. The text from Schiff has not been published. The polling data has not been released. The book is not yet on shelves. Schiff's office dismissed the revelations as old news, though the spokesperson's statement notably did not deny the existence of the text message or dispute that Schiff privately wanted Biden gone before saying so publicly.
The open questions are significant. What exactly did the Schiff text say, and when was it sent? Which other party leaders does Li plan to name? What do the internal poll numbers actually show? And who authorized the use of the autopen if Biden was unable to govern?
If even half of what Lindy Li claims is true, the 2024 Democratic primary was not a democratic process at all. It was a managed event in which party insiders knew their candidate was failing, knew their backup was their weakest option, and chose to mislead donors and voters rather than risk an honest fight.
That is not a story about one man's health. It is a story about institutional dishonesty, about a party apparatus that valued control over candor, and that asked the American public to trust a candidate its own leaders did not believe in.
The voters figured it out in November. Li's book may finally show just how long the insiders knew before the rest of us did.